China Zhong Jin Yin Di City Development is investing CNY10 billion in the Moscow property market, which it believes has huge potential and can deliver a high return on investment. The company signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Sistema JSFC, the largest conglomerate in Russia, earlier in the year. Both the companies will jointly bid for a 109-hectare land plot in central Moscow, with total investment expected to reach CNY2.5 billion. Liu Zhifeng, Chairman of the Beijing Real Estate Association, an industry body, said overseas property investment by Chinese firms may exceed USD25 billion this year.

Chinese consumers are expected to remain the biggest spenders in the global luxury market this year, accounting for 46% of worldwide sales of the goods. Chinese shoppers are forecast to spend USD117 billion, or 9% more, on luxury goods in 2015, with 78% of the purchases made overseas, according to a report by the Shanghai-based Fortune Character Institute. But just 10% of worldwide sales were expected to be in China, down from 11% in 2014, the Institute said in its “China Luxury Report 2015”. The report looked at sales of jewelry, watches, accessories and clothes, but not cars, yachts, jets or art. More than 80% of global luxury brands had closed Chinese stores and conditions were set to worsen, Institute Director Zhou Ting said. “We expect more than 95% of the brands will close some of their stores in the coming year, and upgrade the rest – to replace them with experience and service centers,” she said. Some luxury companies such as Gucci are diversifying into food and beverages, and into customized services. Surveying more than 3,800 Chinese with over CNY5 million in assets, the Institute found that brand names carried much less weight now for the rich.

The new Carrefour outlet is located on the North Fourth Ring Road and is adjacent to Swedish home-furnishing retailer Ikea. The two-story hypermarket has more than 80 outlets including fast fashion brand Uniqlo and C&A, sportswear retailer Decathlon, as well as the first Baidu Concept Store, an experience store for hardware products. Spread over an area of 71,380 square meters, the hypermarket is home to more than 40,000 products, of which more than 6,000 are imported. It also has 800 free parking spaces and is the 20th store of the French retailer in Beijing. “We are focusing on imported food products as there has been a sea change in the food preferences of Chinese consumers. It is quite different from what I saw when I first came to China in 1995,” said Laurent Olszewski, Regional Manager for the North-West China region at Carrefour. He added that Carrefour is expanding its e-commerce business by January next year after finishing work on a logistics center in Tianjin. Carrefour’s current expansion is an indication that the French retailer is not swayed by the growth slowdown in China. Rather, the new outlet is seen as a move by the company to gain more consumers with higher incomes, the China Daily reports.

Boyalife Group’s Sinica subsidiary is building the world’s largest animal cloning factory in Tianjin, aiming to produce one million cattle embryos annually, with an investment of CNY200 million. Among the animals it will clone are also sniffer and pet dogs, high-grade beef cattle, racehorses and “non-human primates”. The project could rapidly improve the quality of livestock. The Peking University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation are also partners in the project. Boyalife Chairman Xu Xiaochun said the center would produce 100,000 cattle embryos a year before expanding annual output to one million. Xu said Chinese farmers had struggled to breed enough beef cattle to meet market demand and the center would be the largest of its kind in the world. The factory also plans to set up a cloning lab, a gene bank and a science education center. Since 2000, Chinese scientists have cloned sheep, cattle and pigs. China’s first commercial cloning company was established in September 2014 in Shandong province with the birth of three pure-blooded Tibetan mastiff puppies, the South China Morning Post reports.

The Chinese government is trying to rid the stock market of collusion between power and money by stepping up investigations of securities companies, analysts said, while warning of shocks to the markets that had just stabilized. Three of China’s top 10 brokerage companies by assets – Citic Securities, Guosen Securities and Haitong Securities – reported last week that they were being investigated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), all suspected for having breached securities regulations. “Clearly Xi Jinping is trying to change a rather long-held culture where those who obtain powerful positions believe that the rules don’t apply to them, and that clearly is changing and he has changed behavior,” said Professor Paul Gillis, from Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. Citic Securities President Cheng Boming was taken by police for investigation in September, while Guosen Securities’ President Chen Hongqiao, hanged himself in his Shenzhen home in late October, after his former boss Zhang Yujun, an Assistant Chairman at the CSRC, was taken in for questioning in September. In November, CSRC Vice Chairman Yao Gang became the most senior figure to be caught up in the crackdown. Shares of all the brokerage companies plunged on November 27, as panicked investors dumped their holdings, the South China Morning Post reports. The Shanghai Composite Index sank 5.5% on November 27, the steepest percentage decline since August 25, wiping out all the gains for the index since early November.