On January 5, 2024, when most people were still immersed in the joy of celebrating the New Year, the first thunderstorm of 2024 had quietly arrived.
China's largest private financial group, Zhongzhi, officially declared bankruptcy due to insolvency, and hundreds of thousands of related investors also "lost their capital".
Sorting out the capital disk of the Zhongzhi system, the capital empire of Zhongzhi Group covers finance, wealth management, investment and other industries, and its platforms include Datang Wealth, Hengtian Wealth, Zhongrong Trust, Xinhu Wealth, Goldman Sachs Wealth and other dozens of financial and first-class platforms, with a total asset scale of more than one trillion yuan, which can be called the top player in private capital.
Its helmsman, Xie Zhikun, has been praised by Forbes as a "potential underwater financial giant", although it is not obvious, but behind the ups and downs of the financial market, he is always fueling the trouble.
However, there are no permanent winners in the market.
Beginning in 2020, the thunderstorm events of the "planting system" have emerged in an endless stream, from Tianshan Biology, Rong Yu Group, Kangsheng shares to Kane shares, the listed companies it invested in or performance thunderstorms or mergers and acquisitions encountered pits, and the planting system gradually fell off the altar in the investment circle.
In 2023, with the downturn in the real estate market, the situation of Zhongzhi Group has deteriorated further.
According to the relevant disclosure of Zhongzhi Group, its book assets are only 200 billion yuan, but the debt is as high as about 450 billion yuan, even after considering the disposal of book assets, the net debt is still more than 200 billion yuan, which is 5 times the amount involved in the thunderstorm of Henan village and town banks.
The mysterious death of its founder, Xie Zhikun, has made the bankruptcy of Zhongzhi Group more and more confusing.
Although public information says that Xie Zhikun died of a heart attack while yoga, rumors of Xie Zhikun's suicide are circulating in the rivers and lakes.
After Xie Zhikun's death, his wife Mao Amin firmly stated that he would not inherit her husband's inheritance, and Zhongzhi Group also bypassed his wife Mao Amin and daughter Xie Rutong, and changed it to Xie Zhikun's nephew Xie Zizheng to inherit, which was really incomprehensible to the ** at that time.
It was not until November 26, 2023, 2 years after Xie Zhikun's death, that the hidden thunder of the Zhongzhi system broke out, and Chaoyang** publicly stated that he would file a case for investigation of the suspected illegal and criminal situation of the Zhongzhi system in accordance with the law, and his nephew Xie Zizheng was also taken criminal coercive measures as a criminal suspect.
As a generation of wealthy people, why did Xie Zhikun mysteriously die of yoga at the age of 61?
How did the planting system shrink from trillions of assets under management to 200 billion liabilities?
Sorting out the history of the planting system, its capital puzzle was laid as early as when the founder Xie Zhikun established the planting group.
Born in 1961 in Yichun, a small city in Heilongjiang Province, Xie was only a worker in a printing factory in Wuying District, Xiaoxinganling, northeast China.
Although his work was unremarkable, Xie soon found his "way to riches" - reselling red pine.
Red pine can be said to be the most important specialty of Xie Zhikun's hometown, in the 90s of the 20th century, when the economy of Northeast China stalled, many locals looked to Korean pine to solve the problem of livelihood, and Xie Zhikun is one of the buyers of red pine.
In 1995, Xie Zhikun established Heilongjiang Zhongzhi Enterprise Group Co., Ltd., whose business scope is wooden semi-finished products and timber, which is also the predecessor of Zhongzhi system.
Relying on the reselling of red pine, Xie Zhikun quickly harvested the first pot of gold in his life. With money, the company's business scope began to expand rapidly, in 1997 and 1999 into the paper business and real estate development, and then gradually expanded to the highway industry, water conservancy development and other fields.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to Xie Zhikun, the Xie family also has a little-known master - Xie Zhichun, who used to be the general manager of ** Huijin.
In 2001, Xie Zhichun was promoted to President of Everbright and became a senior executive of Everbright Group.
Also in 2001, Zhongzhi Company officially entered the financial field by holding 60% of the shares of Harbin International Trust and Investment Company, and began to actively develop the trust business in the following year, taking advantage of the restructuring of state-owned enterprises to successfully catch the express train of financial transformation.
The shell of the trust and investment company is there, but the endorsement of private enterprises is still "almost meaningless".
Xie Zhikun did not panic at all, first waved his hand to change the name of "Harbin Trust" to "Zhongrong Trust", crowned with the name of "Zhong", and then transferred 36% of the shares of Zhongrong Trust to the central enterprise warp and weft textile machinery, successfully putting on the coat of "central enterprise trust" to the trust company.
With the endorsement of central enterprises, Zhongrong Trust quickly and successfully entered the first echelon of the trust industry, and then further developed Datang Wealth, Gaosheng Wealth, Xinhu Wealth and Hengtian Wealth, which are also labeled as "central enterprises and state-owned enterprises" with Zhongrong Trust.
After more than 30 years of development, Zhongzhi has successfully built an industrial + financial system with minerals and real estate as the original assets and wealth management companies such as Zhongrong Trust and Datang Wealth as financing intermediaries.
With the "Zhongzi prefix" and "central enterprise trust", Zhongzhi Group has successfully won the trust of investors, and its assets under management once exceeded 37 trillion yuan, becoming the top 1 domestic trust enterprises.
Although Zhongzhi Group has grown into a leading trust enterprise with the endorsement of central enterprises and trillions of assets after more than 30 years of development, in fact, the trust business of Zhongzhi Group is still the same as the timber business at the beginning of Xie Zhikun's fortune, but it is a game of buying low and selling high.
If you don't enjoy reselling timber, then resell equity arbitrage.
In the financial equity arbitrage market, Zhongzhi Group takes the model of equity investment after financing: by raising funds from investors at a relatively low interest rate, and then investing the raised money in private enterprises with financing needs to obtain higher returns, a bit like a "usury" bank.
On the one hand, listed companies can obtain a steady stream of financial support through trust companies and wealth management companies, on the other hand, the PE of trust companies is to obtain additional shares of listed companies or unlisted assets in popular emerging industries, so as to obtain arbitrage in the future market value growth, and investors can also "lie down and make money" based on the rich profits of trust arbitrage to obtain returns, and all three parties seem to be happy.
However, there are many prerequisites for this model to be established.
First of all, in order to attract investors who are willing to give up depositing money in the bank and transferring it to the trust company to deposit money on the financing side, it is necessary to have sufficient interests and brand endorsement.
Brand endorsement is not difficult for Zhongzhi Group, which has set the shell of a "central enterprise", but the interests need to promise investors a sufficient interest rate to make investors excited.
According to relevant data, the rate of return of trust products is generally 8% to 10%, that is, only the promise of 8-10% rate of return can be won by investors.
Although the yield of 8-10% may not sound outrageous, considering the rebate of about 1% of wealth management shares, and then taking into account various operating costs such as office rents and employee salaries, the actual comprehensive cost of funds of the trust may be as high as 15% to 16%, which is difficult for ordinary companies to afford.
Secondly, in order to achieve trust arbitrage with trillions of assets on the investment side, it is necessary to have a financing gap in the market for private enterprises of the same scale. And find 3It is not easy to find 7 trillion enterprises with financing needs, and it is even more difficult to find those who are willing to pay more than 15% of the interest rate to borrow money.
In other words, what seems to be a mature investment model of "buy low and sell high" actually requires "buy high and sell higher" to achieve profitability.
However, high returns must come with high risks.
You must know that the gross profit margin of many entities is only 15% a year, so those who are willing to pay more than 15% interest to borrow money are often enterprises that banks are unwilling to lend and it is difficult to obtain funds through traditional financing channels. Such enterprises are often accompanied by a higher risk of bankruptcy.
On the one hand, there are very few companies in the market that are willing to pay high interest for financing, on the other hand, the high bankruptcy risk of such enterprises leads to the risk that the investment of the trust can not be recovered.
Since it is a Ponzi financing game of shadow banking, why has Zhongzhi Group survived for more than 30 years and only now collapsed?
Dismantling the underlying assets of Zhongzhi Group, most of the trust products flow to real estate-related industries.
On the one hand, the financing cost of up to 15% or even 20% can only be played by real estate developers who also play the game of "beating the drum and passing the flowers"; On the other hand, many investors of Zhongzhi Group, which received financing funds, also focused on the real estate market after "having money in their hands", in order to make quick profits and reach their profit targets.
After all, before "housing is not speculation", the rapid profitability of the real estate market is obvious to all.
Directly or indirectly, Zhongzhi Group's money quickly flowed to the real estate industry, and one of the most important characteristics of the real estate industry is that it is highly correlated with the economic cycle.
In the economic upcycle, although the enterprises in the real estate chain have borrowed money at a high interest rate of 15%, with the rapid growth of the housing market and land prices, real estate companies can obtain 30% of the gross profit through high turnover, which is naturally profitable.
Taking Country Garden as an example, from 2011 to 2015, Country Garden's gross profit margin was generally 30%-35%, and supporting 15% of the capital turnover cost was naturally a piece of cake.
However, under the trend of stabilizing the economic cycle, a series of market-stabilizing policies such as "housing for living, not speculation" for the real estate industry have been released, and the entire real estate industry has been on the verge of bubble bursting, and the situation has begun to take a sharp turn for the worse.
In addition to real estate products, another set of "PE + listed companies" arbitrage model of the planting system is not smooth.
According to the routine of the "PE + listed company" model, the planting system first participated in the private placement of listed companies to obtain the right to speak, and then used PE** to invest in related enterprises in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and merged them into the scope of listed companies to raise the valuation, so as to avoid complicated listing procedures and realize the arbitrage of exit from the secondary market.
For example, in 2014, the transformation and merger and acquisition case of Zhongnan Heavy Industry and the subsequent financing and merger and acquisition cases of Huawei Culture, Chaohua Technology, Tianlong Group, Jiadu Technology, GEM and other enterprises, you can find the shadow of the capital technology of the "PE + listed company" of the Zhongzhi system.
However, after 2015, with the downturn, financial deleveraging and new regulations on asset management have been issued one after another, it has become more and more difficult to exit the secondary market, and the financing model of shadow banking of trust enterprises has also collapsed.
By 2018, the reform of the registration system basically blocked the cash-out strategy of the backdoor listing of the "PE+ listed companies" of the planting system, and the capital operation of the planting system further deteriorated.
In the final analysis, Ponzi's drumming game can indeed flourish under the long-term low interest rate and high-asset loose monetary policy of the economic upward cycle, but when the cycle is down, the risk of the underlying assets corresponding to trust financing gradually emerges, and under the low asset yield, the capital chain of trust financing is broken, and it is difficult to avoid the failure of products to be paid on time.
Since 2020, the high-risk hidden mines buried in the early pursuit of high returns in the planting system have also begun to emerge, from Tianshan Biology, Kangsheng shares to Rong Yu Group, Kane shares, the listed companies of the "planting system" have been hidden mines, and the money invested by the planting group has also been lost.
On the financing side, the arbitrage space has also been shrinking under the improvement of the regulatory system, and the difficulty of financing has increased linearly.
On the investment side, the economic growth rate has declined, and the risks on the investment side have begun to emerge under the cyclical trend. "Buy low and sell high" has gradually become difficult to "buy low", and it is also difficult to "sell high".
According to the relevant ** report, a person who used to work in the "planting system" once revealed: "It is too difficult to compress the scale of the company's financing end, and the investment side cannot get back the money, so it can only borrow the new to pay off the old and roll down." ”
Until the Evergrande thunderstorm fired the first shot of the collapse of the real estate capital chain, the real estate industry was stunned, and Zhongzhi Group was even more confused.
On the one hand, the "high buying" of trillions of assets of the investor's money, on the other hand, the "higher selling" of the money can not be recovered because of the real estate crash, the more Zhongzhi Group borrows, the more it loses, under the snowball of negative profits, the former trillion assets "roll" into a debt of 200 billion, after all, ushered in the "avalanche" bankruptcy.
With the investigation of Xie Zhikun's nephew Xie Zizheng and the declaration of bankruptcy of Zhongzhi Group, the risk dismantling of Zhongzhi Group has begun.
With the gradual acceleration of bankruptcy liquidation, the "avalanche" case of the planting system is about to usher in the final chapter.
In the final analysis, the explosion of the planting system is by no means accidental, but the inevitable result of the feast of the high-asset value market under the long-term rapid development.
After 30 years of rapid development, the long-term credit expansion cycle has given continuous positive feedback to high asset value, and has also given birth to a large number of Ponzi financing and speculative investors, until the avalanche finally ushered in the big reversal of the credit cycle.
Capital markets have enjoyed a long-term high-asset value carnival for the past 30 years, and now it's finally time to pay the bill.