An era is over.
On December 7, with the fall of the gavel, Zhou Shiping, the former grassroots stock god and godfather of online lending, ushered in the final ending.
Zhou Shiping was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court for committing fund-raising fraud and illegally absorbing public deposits, deprived of political rights for life, and confiscated all personal property.
In economic crimes, this is already the highest punishment that can be given at the legal level in addition to capital punishment, but even with such a heavy sentence, I am afraid it will be difficult to make up for Zhou Shiping's harm to society and countless families.
In the 12 years from 2009 to 2021, he has accumulated more than 100 billion yuan in public deposits.
From the godfather of the industry to the prisoner in prison, how did Zhou Shiping raise a tall building, feast guests, and finally collapse?What kind of treacherous undercurrent of the times is hidden behind this?
In 1993, China's ** after two years of development has been restless, the stock index soared from 400 points to 1500 points in just three months, many people in this round of ** made a lot of money, including a friend of Zhou Shiping, he boasted with Zhou Shiping during a meal that he could earn thousands a day.
Zhou Shiping, whose monthly salary is only 40 yuan, was obviously stimulated by his friend's words, and a few days later, he found a friend with 8,000 yuan that he had saved for many years, saying that he wanted to learn from him.
The timing of Zhou Shiping's entry was very delicate, when ** had just gone through a big bull market, ** ushered in ** soon after**, the 1500 point stock index fell back to 300 points in a year, this round ** was later called: China's first bear market.
Zhou Shiping's 8,000 yuan principal was only 400 yuan after the end of **, and many years of hard work were once gone.
Although he made a fortune and said that this experience was not a big deal, and he should pay the tuition fees, he himself did not seem to be so indifferent at that time.
After falling into 300 points, Zhou Shiping's action at that time was to keep borrowing money**, after borrowing all the relatives and friends around him, he finally got another 40,000 yuan, fortunately, this time he gambled right.
On July 31, 1994, the People's Republic of China published an article entitled "The China Securities Regulatory Commission and the relevant departments of the People's Republic of China jointly discussed measures to stabilize and develop the market", which was the first rescue measure introduced in the history of New China, and the effect was immediate, the next day when the article was reported, the stock index rushed from 300 points to 1052 points, an increase of more than 200%.
Zhou Shiping's principal also doubled to 600,000 in this round of **, and under the significant halo effect, his relatives and friends came to the door to entrust **, and by 1996, his principal had grown to 3 million.
However, the good times did not last long, in 1997, the Asian financial crisis broke out, Zhou Shiping's 3 million turned into 300,000, and the originally kind relatives and friends also turned into debt handlers on the spot and took them to court, while his wife handed the last knife at a critical moment: a divorce agreement.
In this way, with heavy debts, with a depressed mood, and with firm determination, Zhou Shiping bid farewell to Jiangsu, where he had lived for more than 20 years, and single-handedly walked to the place where miracles shine: Shenzhen.
Zhou Shiping finally ushered in a turnaround, but that was eight years later.
In 2005, with the outbreak of another round of bull market, he finally paid off all his debts after eight years of hard work, and also bought four properties in Shenzhen.
At this time, the emerging financial model P2P originated in the United States has been quietly introduced to Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and other frontier cities, and Zhou Shiping, who has experienced the ups and downs, is keenly aware of the gradual outbreak of private lending demand behind the P2P platform, so he established Hongling Venture Capital in the name of the street where the company is located.
Zhou Shiping's entrepreneurship has caught up with the good era of industry development.
At that time, P2P was still an advanced thing that represented innovation and even high technology, and the official even used it as an innovation benchmark for China's financial industry, which was called: Internet Finance.
P2P, as the name suggests, is person to person, that is, investors directly connect with borrowers, in the early days of the industry, the mainstream model is that the platform only provides matching services for borrowers and investors, and the investment risk is at your own risk.
Zhou Shiping has been up and down for many years, and he understands people's psychology of gain and loss and the acceptance of risks, so he launched a new model of rigid payment: if investors lose money in Hongling Venture Capital, the platform will pay the full amount.
In addition, he also created a new way of playing with large targets, that is, borrowers are no longer limited to private borrowers, but further broadened to large companies and large projects, taking one of the financing announcements as an example, the main borrower is the top 50 in China's steel industry, with a loan amount of 100 million yuan.
The full amount of the platform, coupled with the credibility guarantee brought by large companies, allowed Hongling to quickly occupy the trust of users after its establishment, and its annual transaction volume was 9 million when it was established in 2009, and it has soared to 100 billion in 2016, more than 10,000 times.
Zhou Shiping, who has created a number of industry models, has also been crowned as the godfather of online lending by the industry, and he has been in the limelight for a while.
The biggest risk in the online lending industry stems from the non-performing assets and bad debt ratio.
Due to the differences between risk control itself and the traditional financial industry, and the deliberate relaxation of audit standards by the platform for growth, the average bad debt rate of the P2P industry is about 8%, and the overdue rate is more than 20%.
Since 2014, Zhou Shiping has said that he will fully introduce the bank's model and system to build Hongling into a leading Internet bank in China.
To this end, he also deliberately poached people from major traditional financial institutions, invited various official authorities to report on it, and obtained certifications such as high-quality enterprises from regulators.
However, these attempts do not seem to have reversed the bad debt rate of Hongling, especially crucially, because Hongling is mainly dominated by large targets, the bad debts of each project are often accompanied by huge losses.
According to Hongling's official data, it had 500 million yuan in bad debts at the end of 2015, 2.5 billion yuan in 2016, and 5 billion yuan in 2017.
Due to the high interest rate standard of more than 10% generally prevailing in P2P, coupled with the already high cost of financial customer acquisition, borrowing costs and bad debt costs, which makes the net profit margin of the platform itself very meager, CITIC ** once said in a research report that the average net profit margin of the P2P platform is about 3%, which also leads to many platforms eventually driven by bad debts and have to embark on the road of borrowing new to repay the old.
Hongling died suddenly.
In 2016, with the brutal growth of the P2P industry, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) promulgated the Interim Measures for the Management of Business Activities of Online Lending Information Intermediaries, which clearly stipulates that "the upper limit of the loan balance of the same natural person on the same online lending platform shall not exceed 200,000 yuan;The upper limit of the loan balance of the same legal person or other organization on the same online lending platform shall not exceed 1 million yuan".
This rule directly cut off the foundation on which Hongling Venture Capital depended, and the large-amount target business was completely suspended, and Zhou Shiping immediately shouted out that he wanted to liquidate the online loan business and change his career to an investment bank.
However, it is one thing to say and another thing to do, although it is shouting about the liquidation of the online loan business, the action of Hongling's issuance of investment targets has not stopped for a moment, and by 2021, the cumulative investment scale of the platform has reached 452.8 billion yuan.
On the evening of July 22, 2021, Shennan Co., Ltd., an A-share listed company, announced that Zhou Shiping, the controlling shareholder and actual controller of the company, had been taken criminal coercive measures by the Futian Public Security.
According to the investigation of the public procuratorate and law enforcement organs, Zhou Shiping still defrauded more than 20.4 billion yuan by issuing false loan targets despite knowing that there was a huge gap in funds, and as of the time of the platform thunderstorm, the scale of its pending payment was about 223800 million yuan.
Throughout Zhou Shiping's entire business career, it can be said that there is prosperity and prosperity, and death is also sudden, and there is also the trend of the times throughout between.
In 2008, financial innovation was the pride of the sky, and in 2018, financial innovation was a major hidden danger of systemic financial risks.
At its peak, there were more than 5,000 P2P platforms in operation, and now they are completely zero.
There is no era of Zhou Shiping, only Zhou Shiping in the era, which may be the best and most appropriate evaluation of this grassroots god and godfather of online lending.
Well, the above is all the content of this issue, I am a business-loving consultant, we'll see you next time!