China will build 10 traditional Chinese medicine trading centers worldwide by 2015 to promote TCM abroad. Key tasks include fostering TCM talents, supporting scientific innovations and developing a statistics system for the TCM trade. Currently, China exports its TCM services, such as TCM training and medical treatments, to 160 countries and regions worldwide. The total trading volume of TCM services is nearly CNY2.5 billion, said Wang Guoqiang, Director of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. China has 36,000 institutes involved in TCM medical services, research and training, 803,000 certified TCM teachers and 15,000 people involved in new technology research and development of TCM.

Growth in transactions at the Canton Fair has slowed. They totaled USD8.5 billion in the first phase of the fair, up just 1.1% over the previous session. The fair’s first phase, which ran from April 15 to 19, focused on consumer electronics, home appliances, lighting, motorbikes, cars and car parts, machinery, hardware, construction materials, sanitary products and chemicals. “We are facing declining exports due to weak demand from buyers from traditional markets,” said Liu Jianjun, Spokesman for the Canton Fair. At the ongoing second phase of the fair, the number of buyers from Europe and the United States has declined a lot, according to Liu. The EU remained China’s largest trading partner in the first quarter, though bilateral trade growth was just 2.6% year-on-year at USD126.87 billion. China’s trade with the U.S. increased 9.3% to USD106.77 billion. China’s exports rose 7.6% in the first quarter to USD430 billion.

China’s economic growth will slow to anywhere between 7.5% and 8.5% this year, a marked slowdown from the 10.3% average in the past decade, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The credit rating agency said the government’s Aa3 foreign and local currency bond ratings remained the same as did its “positive” rating outlook even though the euro-zone recession was dragging on. The rating – the same as Belgium, Chile, Japan and Saudi Arabia – is based on favorable medium-term economic growth prospects and the central government’s ample fiscal headroom to manage contingent risks in the banking system, it said. Moody’s forecast on China’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth this year compares with the 8.1% to 8.6% range predicted by seven brokerages polled by the South China Morning Post. GDP in the first quarter tapered off to 8.1% year on year from an 8.9% rise in the fourth quarter of last year. Moody’s said the central government’s decision to launch a new wave of financial reforms was necessary to sustain economic growth for the rest of the decade. Recent reform initiatives included a pilot scheme to legalize private financing firms to lend money in Wenzhou; widening the U.S. dollar-yuan trading band; and tripling the quotas available for institutional investors looking to sink cash into the securities market. Credit ratings agency Fitch said U.S. manufacturers recorded slower growth in China in the first quarter.

Private equity firm Actis, a spin-out of the British government’s investment agency Commonwealth Development Corporation, is selling its majority stake in Xiabu Xiabu Catering Management, a hot pot restaurant chain. It bought the stake for USD50 million in 2008 and is trying to sell it for more than USD150 million. The sale is considered a rare opportunity for foreign investors to obtain control of a household-name restaurant brand in China. Actis has hired investment banks to advise it on the sale, which is considered still in the early stages, as no formal bids have come in. One of Xiabu Xiabu’s main competitors in China is Little Sheep, which was listed in Hong Kong and taken over this year by U.S. fast-food restaurant Yum! Brands, the owner of Pizza Hut and KFC. Little Sheep’s early investors included two private equity funds – British investor 3i Group and China-focused Prax Capital. They both made more than three times their original investment in Little Sheep when they cashed out. Xiabu Xiabu was founded by a Taiwanese businessman in Beijing in 1998 and has expanded aggressively in the past few years. Xiabu Xiabu currently runs more than 240 restaurants around the country and aims to expand its restaurant network to the rest of the world. A typical meal at Xiabu Xiabu costs about CNY30 per person, which is similar to McDonald’s.

Sinopec Group may inject only as much as half of its global oil and gas reserves into Sinopec Corp as it holds on to assets in volatile countries such as Syria, far from enough to cut the unit’s exposure to unprofitable refining at home. Fu Chengyu, who became Chairman of both companies a year ago, said last month that China’s largest refiner was seeking to buy more overseas upstream assets from its parent to boost oil and gas production and counter mounting losses from selling petrol and diesel at state-controlled prices. Sinopec Group has spent at least USD32 billion buying global assets in the past three years, including the USD7.24 billion purchase of Swiss explorer Addax Petroleum in 2009 to gain access to fields in West Africa and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region. It was China’s biggest overseas acquisition. At least half of the group’s overseas assets are in countries such as Syria, Argentina and Russia, where the reserves are either of poorer quality, too small or in areas fraught with high political risk, analysts say. “They will inject the ones that are not contentious. So they are not going to inject Syria, Iran and all of that,” said an energy banker with an international bank in Hong Kong. Sinopec made its first, and so far only, acquisition of overseas upstream assets in 2010 when it bought deepwater oilfields in Angola from its parent for USD2.46 billion. The parent’s assets in North America, Brazil and Australia, and some of the assets held by Addax, may be targeted first, said Scott Darling, Director of Barclays Capital’s Asia oil and gas research. The assets may boost Sinopec’s oil and gas production by 40% to about 1.5 million barrels per day (BPD). Sinopec Group holds around 2.2 billion BOE of overseas proven reserves. Sinopec reported net profit growth of 2% last year, lagging behind the 29% gain posted by Chinese offshore oil producer CNOOC, which does not refine crude oil. Sinopec had a refining loss of USD5.9 billion in 2011 as increases in state-regulated fuel prices failed to keep pace with gains in world crude prices. Refining and sale of oil products accounted for 59% of Sinopec’s operating revenue last year. Sinopec’s 2011 oil and gas output was only a third of PetroChina’s 1.29 billion BOE, while its refining capacity of 4.4 million BPD is about 60% bigger than PetroChina’s 2.7 million BPD, the South China Morning Post reports.