On September 2, President Xi Jinping delivered a video speech at the 2021 China International Trade Fair in Services Global Service Trade Summit, announcing that the Beijing Stock Exchange will be established to create a main position for service-innovative small and medium-sized enterprises.
This move is an important measure to comprehensively deepen the reform of the capital market under the new situation in China. It will effectively promote China to deepen the structural reform of the financial supply side and enhance the function of the capital market to serve the real economy.
First, the capital market covers a wider area and has a stronger function of promoting high-quality development.
Since China launched direct financing in the capital market in the early 1990s, the Shanghai Stock Exchange has been based on the main board, focusing on serving leading companies and large-scale backbone companies in various industries and regions. In 2019, the Science and Technology Innovation Board was officially opened to support high-tech companies. Development and growth; The Shenzhen Stock Exchange is based on the small and medium-sized board, and then opened the ChiNext to serve medium-sized and start-up companies.
However, regardless of the Shanghai Stock Exchange or the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the threshold for listing is relatively high. In the past 30 years, less than 1% of the national enterprises have been able to receive financial support from the capital market, and the ability to serve the real economy is not strong enough.
At present, as China has entered a new stage of high-quality development, it needs to continuously improve the national innovation system and cultivate and strengthen new driving forces for innovation and development.
The establishment of the Beijing Stock Exchange will promote the upgrading of the new third board trading platform for the transfer of national SME equity to a standardized and standardized stock exchange. It is undoubtedly a major adjustment to the structure of China’s capital market. It is highly compatible with the actual needs of China’s economic development and will be greatly improved. Increasing the number of listed companies in China, expanding the scope of financing in the capital market, and becoming a powerful "accelerator" to promote the high-quality development of innovative SMEs.
Second, the layout of the capital market is more reasonable, and competition is introduced to improve the efficiency of stock exchanges.
At present, the problem of China's unbalanced and insufficient development is still prominent, and the regional development gap is still large. One of the reasons that cannot be ignored is the uneven regional financial development and the difference in financial support.
For example, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta have the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and they have strong financial resource aggregation capabilities. A large number of local companies have gone public to raise funds, and have gained significant financial accelerator and amplifier effects.
The establishment of Beijiao will help reverse the imbalance of regional financial development and make the spatial layout of China's capital market more scientific and reasonable.
At the same time, the establishment of the Beijing Stock Exchange will break the original monopoly of listing resources to a certain extent and promote competition among exchanges.
Innovative small and medium-sized enterprises can choose between multiple exchanges, thereby promoting the extensive use of financial technology, institutional innovation, improving service levels, and improving corporate financing efficiency.
Third, strengthen institutional innovation and build a main position for innovative SMEs in financial services.
At present, the number of high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises and high-tech enterprises has exceeded 200,000.
How to broaden the financing channels of the capital market and promote the healthy development of these enterprises is an urgent problem that China currently needs to solve.
According to international experience, the source of innovation lies in R&D, and R&D investment requires large-scale, long-term capital investment, and there are risks of R&D failure and technological uncertainty.
Venture capital and capital markets are the best financing channels to support innovation. Commercial banks with small capital scales, short maturities, and weak risk tolerance are by no means the main capital providers.
The establishment of the Beijing Stock Exchange has seized the advantage of solving the financial support problem of innovative small and medium-sized enterprises.
Beijiao is established on the basis of the existing NEEQ selection layer, and has the genes of serving innovative small and medium-sized enterprises from the beginning.
Since the establishment of the New Third Board, a large amount of market-oriented capital has been injected into non-listed technology companies, and a group of high value-added and high-growth "little giants" have been cultivated. This is to build the Beijing Stock Exchange into the main position of innovative SMEs in financial services , Laid a solid corporate foundation, market foundation and institutional foundation.
It is worth noting that there is still much work to be done to build the Beijing Stock Exchange into the main position of innovative SMEs in financial services. The key is to innovate boldly and deepen institutional reforms. The core issue is to expand the market significantly in a relatively short period of time. Scale, increase the number of listed companies and successfully attract domestic and foreign investors.
It is necessary to achieve new breakthroughs in listing standards, market pricing, trading platforms, information disclosure, investor rights protection, risk management, cost management, etc., to achieve differentiated development.
(Tu Yonghong, Dean of the Yangtze River Economic Belt Research Institute, Renmin University of China, Professor of the School of Finance)