New home prices in China rose faster in November, after slowing for four consecutive months since July. Prices climbed in 33 cities last month, six more than in October, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which tracks housing prices in 70 cities around the country, said. Prices in 10 cities were flat while they fell in the remaining 27. Shenzhen led the gainers in November with a month-on-month rise of 2.9%, accelerating from a 1.2% gain in October. Next was Shanghai with a 1.9% monthly rise, and Nanjing in Jiangsu province with a 1.4% growth. They ranked first and second in October, respectively. New and existing home markets in first and second-tier cities all registered faster price growth, while in tertiary cities new home prices stopped declining while prices of pre-owned houses remained flat, the NBS said. Year-on-year, prices of new and pre-owned homes kept rising more quickly last month – up 1.5 percentage points and 1.2 percentage points, respectively, from October’s increases.

Marks & Spencer (M&S), the British clothing and food retailer, opened its first flagship store in Beijing as part of its strategy to increase its presence in large cities in China. The 131-year-old high street retailer has 10 outlets in China. The new 1,500 square meter store located at The Place has features of a premium boutique shopping environment, including womenswear, menswear, lingerie and kidswear and a food hall. The food hall stocks more than 1,200 types of imported food and wines. The store also has an in-store bakery and a coffee station. The boutique store concept was first introduced in Brussels in May this year, Costas Antimissaris, Marks & Spencer’s International Director said, adding that the store in Beijing is the first to adopt the concept on the Chinese mainland. M&S’s target customers are middle and upper middle class Chinese families, said Antimissaris. The retailer also has an online presence on Tmall.com and JD.com.

Physics World magazine’s “2015 Breakthrough of the Year” award went to Professor Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Their team was recognized for the “fundamental importance” of their research into quantum physics. Never in the history of China has a government taken so much interest and invested so many resources in scientific research and technological development as the current one, said historian Chen Pu, who is also Assistant Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the History of Natural Science in Beijing. The work by another team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) ranked third in the magazine’s list of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year. They were among the first scientists to discover Weyl fermions, a so-called “ghost particle” that scientists believe could replace electrons as carriers of information in computers of the future. In China, government expenditure on research and development (R&D) has been increasing at the rate of over 20% a year for more than a decade. In the United States, budget cuts have resulted in an annual decline of up to 9% in scientific funding since 2009, the South China Morning Post reports.

The number and value of initial public offerings (IPOs) by Chinese companies in overseas markets have plummeted this year, while the number of firms seeking a domestic listing have soared. Data from Bloomberg showed that Chinese companies announced just 14 overseas listings worth a combined USD666 million, a 98% fall from USD29 billion in 2014 – both the lowest total number and lowest value in four years. There were also a record number of 38 Chinese firms delisting in the United States and seeking to relist at home, of which five have already completed the procedure. The switch from an approval to a registration procedure for IPOs on the domestic stock market will lower the listing threshold, simplify the process and emphasize financial disclosure. Official figures showed USD17 billion worth of funds was raised from IPOs at the Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses this year, a 33% year-on-year increase, even with a four-month suspension in listings, which ended in November. Separate data from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) showed that in the first half of the year, Chinese bourses registered 187 IPOs, worth CNY146.1 billion, a 260% year-on-year growth in deal numbers and a 314% year-on-year increase in value. KPMG forecast that the Shanghai Stock Exchange alone will have seen 89 IPOs by the end of 2015, triple the number of last year, and worth CNY108 billion, to become the world’s fourth-largest IPO market, the China Daily reports.

Future Land, which recently became the first Chinese developer to successfully complete a shift listing from the B-share market to the A share market, said the process was “full of challenges”. Future Land’s A shares were listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on December 4. “We encountered the stock crash and IPO suspension when pushing forward our restructuring,” Future Land’s Executive Director Kenny Chan said. “Some of our investors worried if we could pass the process, but we just kept our pace and obtained all the approvals through the worst environment.” Future Land originally owned a subsidiary (Jiangsu Future Land) listed in China’s B-share market. Future Land’s parent Future Land Development is listed in Hong Kong. China’s B-share market has long been considerd as marginalized and illiquid. It is denominated in foreign currency and used to be open only to foreign investors. To switch to A shares, Future Land proposed to issue A shares to all shareholders of the B-share listed subsidiary along with absorbing and merging with the latter by way of a share swap. Chan said it was very challenging and time consuming to get approvals from all the parties, such as the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and shareholders.