Hong Kong vs Singapore as Offshore RMB Centre

While Hong Kong remains the leading offshore RMB (Yuan, or CNY) centre in the world, there are recent changes that help make offshore RMB market in Singapore more competitive.

Singapore as an Emerging offshore RMB centre

On 8 February 2013, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that People's Bank of China (PBoC) already appointed Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC Stock Codes: 1398.HK for H-shares and 601398.SH for A-shares) officially as RMB clearing bank in Singapore. This action will certainly increase the size of RMB liquidity pool in Singapore and will speed up the development of offshore RMB market there.

It is the first time Bank of China (BOC Stock Codes: 3988.HK for H-shares and 601988.SH for A-shares) is not selected as RMB clearing bank outside mainland China. Bank of China (BOC) is the sole RMB clearing bank for Taiwan and Hong Kong regions. Now the decision of PBoC (People's Bank of China) clearly shows that Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Singapore branch has broken the exclusive clearing status of BOC in overseas RMB business.

Although Hong Kong is still the biggest offshore RMB centre in the world with a large RMB deposit base outside mainland China, other regional emerging hubs such as Singapore, London and even recently Taiwan are now becoming more and more competitive.

From competition of Dual-Currency IPO between Singapore and Hong Kong, it is quite obvious that foreign exchange (forex) business is a weakness for Hong Kong financial market.

Therefore, it is advisable that Hong Kong shall further develop its forex trading business in order to maintain its status as.the leading offshore RMB center worldwide.

An Important 2012 Internal Review For You

There were really lots of changes for our website, Mr China, in 2012. As usual, we are going to announce our annual internal review here. This annual review also includes 2012 milestones for development of our Mr China website:

(1) Good news was our website, Mr China, has become more and more popular. Since the beginning of last year, we started to get PR2 (Google PageRank). We have also been successfully in the first pages (for search term 'Mr China') in either Google or Bing engines searches.

Remark: By end-2012, our Google PageRank was even further promoted to PR4 from PR2.

(2) In January 2012, we began to implement Google AdSense in our website. Source: Google AdSense Implementation.

(3) In March 2012, since AlertPay (now becomes Payza) could not process credit cards, so our management decided to add PayPal as an alternative for receiving payments. Reference: Donation Methods.

(4) On April 2012, one of our editors removed the following statement in an article:

China has indicated no intention to give up +8% as the minimum annual economic growth by GDP in PRC.

*Article Source 2012 GDP target.

Our editor initially explained that it might cause misleading to readers if the statement was kept. We, as an Internal Aaudit Team, however do not agree with this explanation. Our chief editor finally decided to improve our page modification process. Our new modification process now requires prior approvals from both our chief editor and also our Internal Audit Team for any proposed change(s) or update(s).

(5) In July 2012, we wrote in our article relating to Interest Rate Reform For Chinese Banks that:

We decide that stocks of Chinese commercial banks will not be our picks in 2012.

As you may also realize, stock performance of Chinese banks in 2012 was, as we expected, not satisfactory. One of the main reasons was that such interest rate reform did reduce the growth rate for Chinese banking sector.

(6) In July 2012, our website successfully hit 100th articles. Source: Our 100th Article.

(7) It is also time to wrap up our annual article performance. Here are our Top 5 Articles for 2012 with topics about:

(i) Google AdSense Targets;
(ii) A50 ETF;
(iii) New i-Bond;
(iv) CSI300 ETF;
(v) 2012 GDP Target.

That is all for our 2012 Internal Review. Thanks for reading. See you all next year!

Written by: Independent Internal Audit Team (IIAT).


Related Source(s): Our Internal Audit System for Quality Assurance