Mystery about the mega banker Bao Fan. Beijing does not loosen its grip on tech giants
It seemed all over. After Jack Ma in early January he had sold control of Ant Group, the fintech arm of the giant he created himself, Ali Baba, it was thought that the Chinese government’s grip on Big Tech would end. There had already been several signals in this sense, from the green light for the distribution of new video games to Tencent until the return on the app stores of Chinese smartphones of Didi Chuxing, ithe ride-hailing service that hadn’t been able to accept new subscribers for some time. Until the visit of some Communist Party officials in Hangzhou to Alibaba’s headquarters, which had been carefully avoided ever since Ant’s stock exchange listing was blocked, the episode that in the autumn of 2020 inaugurated the campaign to rectify the private tech giants by the government.
And instead the story, still rather obscure, of Bao Fan sends new worrying signals. Both to the private Chinese giants and, paradoxically, to the government itself. Bao Fan, head of China Renaissance, has been missing for several days and his company is unable to get in touch with him. Bao he is considered the top banker of Chinese Big Tech.
He began his career as an M&A banker at Morgan Stanley in the late 1990s and also worked for Credit Suisse. He was then a consultant to the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. He told the Financial Times in 2018 that, during his time as an M&A banker in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, he initially dealt with state-owned enterprises.
The crucial role of Bao Fan for the success of Chinese Big Tech
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