Century-old Coal Mining Company Reissues Stocks

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, July 02, 2002

Century-old Coal Mining Company Reissues Stocks

A century-old coal mining company in east China's Jiangxi province, believed to have issued China's first modern shares 93 years ago, was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

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A century-old coal mining company in east China's Jiangxi province, believed to have issued China's first modern shares 93 years ago, was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Located in Pingxiang city in western Jiangxi, the Anyuan Industrial Shareholding Ltd., originally the Anyuan Coal Mine founded in 1898, issued 80 million ordinary shares at the price of5.99 RMB yuan (about 0.75 U.S. dollar) per share, company sources said.

Interestingly, the Anyuan Coal Mine issued the country's first batch of stocks in 1909 when it developed into a conglomerate involved in both coal mining and iron smelting.

The Anyuan Coal Mine was once a household name in China as it was also closely associated with late Chairman Mao Zedong's revolutionary history. The story of Mao masterminding and leading a major miners' strike at Anyuan in 1922 was included in textbooks for Chinese school children some 20 or 30 years ago.

Since the early 1990s, China's coal mining sector which enjoyedprivileges under a planned economy, has suffered huge and persistent losses as a result of mismanagement and intense market competition. In the mid 1990s the Chinese government ordered all state-owned coal mining enterprises to curb production or shift toother sectors to get out of their difficulties.

Anyuan got the government go-ahead to be listed in Shanghai because it had become the country's first major state-owned coal mine to complete the transformation and shift its main operations out of coal mining, company sources claimed.

Instead of mining, the newly-listed Anyuan Industrial Shareholding Ltd. mainly focuses on power generation using coal gangue and also on manufacturing buses, sources said. The company earned 112 million yuan (13.5 million U.S. dollars) in profits last year.

With its new Shanghai listings, Anyuan, ranked among the top 10businesses in China's modern history, was looking forward to reviving its glorious past, company officials added.

Since share-trading was resurrected in China in the late 1980s,more than 1,000 firms, mostly state-owned, have been listed in thecountry's two bourses in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

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