Smriti Sharma
The US might add Alibaba and Tencent to the list of companies caught in a slump due to the China stock ban. The Trump administration believes that Tech goliaths like Tencent and Alibaba are majorly controlled by the Chinese military. Military controlled companies pose a threat to the civilians and their data that can be accessed by these companies.
The Defense Department that is responsible for overseeing these matters has not finalized the plan yet and is also discussing adding more companies to the list of those banned. If the two companies are blacklisted, it will ban U.S investors from buying shares in the company starting in November 2021.
Tencent and Alibaba are yet to elaborate on this matter. Matters related to their position in the stock market and blacklisting from it were first reported by WSJ (Wall Street Journal). Trump has released a heap of intense measures against Chinese firms in his final few days in the White House as he tries to solidify his hardline heritage and as Beijing and Washington have conflicted over the Covid and the Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong.
U.S. President Donald Trump marked an executive order prohibiting exchanges with eight Chinese programming applications, including Tencent Holdings Ltd’s QQ Wallet, Ant Group’s Alipay which is a mobile payment app, and WeChat Pay.
Some investors were however skeptical and unsure if this ban is permanent for companies like Tencent and Alibaba because of their high influence in the US stock market. Brendan Ahern said that these private companies are widely owned by investors globally and predominantly from The U.S. He is the Chief Investment Officer of Krane Funds Advisors.
The November chief request looked to offer teeth to a 1999 law that requested that the Defense Department draft a rundown of Chinese organizations considered to be controlled or owned by the Chinese military.
The Pentagon has blacklisted 35 firms so far which include mega-tech SMIC, the top chipmaker of China, and CNOOC, the Chinese oil giant. While the arrival of the November mandate incited index providers like MSCI to start erasing boycotted organizations from their files, disarray about the extent of the guidelines provoked some emotional flip-flops by the New York Stock Exchange lately.
The NYSE planned to delist China Mobile Ltd, China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd., and Telecom Corp from the banned companies on December 31. Recently, however, it took a U-turn after being advised by the regulators closely associated with the U.S Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to keep them on the list. Soon after this U-turn, they decided that they will stick to their original plan. Following suit of the NYSE, S&P Dow Jones Indices said that it will remove the ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) of the previously mentioned telecom companies.