BizChina

BYD and Geely have been the darlings of China’s auto industry.

BYD, which its Chairman, Wang Chuanfu, says stands for “Beyond Your Dreams,” has received a great deal of media attention due to the large investment in the company made by billionaire Warren Buffet and its leadership position in electric vehicles. Geely broke the equivalent of the sound barrier in China autos when it emerged as the winning bidder for Volvo, the first Chinese car company to make an overseas acquisition of a premium brand.

The news has been so universally positive that, if you’ve been following these two companies, you may have been tempted into thinking that the old adage that “trees don’t grow to the sky” simply doesn’t apply. In that context, news last week that both BYD and Geely have now hit serious potholes on the road to becoming true global companies caught everyone’s attention.

Timber giants, squeezed by the twin tongs of a U.S. housing slump and a global recession, are starting to stir again in Canada's north woods thanks to insatiable demand from China.

Here in the Lodgepole pine forest 500 miles north of the U.S.-Canada border, workers at one mill move 40,000 logs a day through an assembly line, producing 13-foot-long studs for the Chinese construction industry. Most of the wood will be used to build scaffolding or the forms that concrete is poured into. But the mill's owner, Canfor Forest Products Inc., hopes to be able to export other products, too.

In the meantime, the loggers are grateful for the Chinese demand. The Lodgepole stands were infested with the mountain pine beetle over the past decade, and the voracious bugs killed off trees across millions of acres, leaving the timber prone to splintering. The combination of the bugs' raging appetites and Chinese builders' prodigious output means that producers here will export every log they can process.

China's Alibaba Group created a new domain for its Taobao Mall business-to-consumer portal, separating the brand from the company's flagship consumer-to-consumer site to give the retail site more prominence. 

Taobao Mall, through which such vendors as Adidas AG, Fast Retailing Co.'s Uniqlo and Lenovo Group Ltd. sell goods, now is available through its own Tmall.com Web address. It previously was available primarily through a link on the Taobao.com consumer-to-consumer site.

Ping An Insurance Company of China Ltd, China's second-largest life insurer, said Wednesday its net profit in the first three quarters of this year reached 13.2 billion yuan ($2 billion), up 8.4 percent year on year.

But the rate of growth slowed compared with the first two quarters as net profit in the third quarter fell 25.9 percent to 3.1 billion yuan, the company said in a report filed with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

The company attributed the slower profit growth to decreasing returns from equity investments compared with the same period last year.

Earnings per share for the third quarter were 0.41 yuan, down 29.3 percent year on year.