2014年 07月 17日 11:59
中國乳製品行業整頓摸準脈門了嗎？Joseph Sternberg
大
概就在六年前的這個時候，數千名中國嬰兒生了病，甚至有幾名生命垂危，而這一切只因為他們吃了含有一種工業化學品的奶粉。2008年的這起醜聞讓中國乳製品行業的弊病暴露無遺。而最近幾週，北京方面清理該行業的努力進一步升級。但是，不要指望這些政府行動會達到其宣傳的效果。導致這麼多嬰兒患病、六名嬰兒死亡的三聚氰胺是一種塑料成份，在奶粉中添加三聚氰胺可以顯示出更高的蛋白質含量，在質量檢測過程中矇騙過關。各界普遍認為，這種事情之所以發生，是因為中國的乳製品行業高度分散化。應該是拮據的小奶農和中間商合謀用加水、加化學品的牛奶欺騙了乳品廠，而且乳品廠無法發現他們的欺詐行為，因為自身的質量控制太容易被愚弄了。
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2008年，京客隆超市，一箱三鹿奶粉從貨架上撤下，一名超市員工正在做記錄。
中國一些新的大型乳品公司開始上市，其中包括最早將於本週在香港上市的中國聖牧有機奶業(China Shengmu Organic Milk)。聖牧稱，該公司將把發行所得用於擴大其在中國的奶牛場網絡。出於差不多的原因，其他一些乳品公司正在接受私募股權投資；阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的馬雲(Jack Ma)就成了這類投資者之一，他的私募公司云鋒基金(Yunfeng Capital)上個月向內蒙古伊利實業集團股份有限公司(Inner Mongolia Yili)的一個子公司注入了大約人民幣20億元（合3.22億美元）。
同時，這些新近擴大了規模的乳製品公司正在大舉進軍海外市場，這是另一個經典的中國公司做法。中國的光明食品(Bright Food)在5月份收購了以色列著名乳製品公司Tnuva 56%的股份。分析師們熱議該筆交易的技術轉讓問題。以色列人將教會其中國老闆最佳安全操作規程。同時，中國嬰兒配方奶粉生產商聖元(Synutra)正在投資9,000萬歐元（合1.22億美元），在法國布列塔尼興建一個新的乳品廠，該廠的產品將通過出口方式回到國內銷售。
這一切聽起來都棒極了——如果你相信2008年這次以及其他災難性事件單純只是乳製品行業分散化的責任的話。但是還有許多國家的乳製品行業也是分散化的，而這些市場這些年來就沒有發生過中國頻繁見到的這種類型和程度的安全事故。
中國乳品行業失敗的根源不在該行業的結構上，而在於中國的經濟結構。別忘了2008年三聚氰胺丑聞的主角三鹿(Sanlu)可不是一個小型家庭奶牛場。三鹿當時是中國最大的奶企之一，新西蘭的恒天然(Fonterra)持有其部分股權，三鹿奶粉當時屬於中國最受歡迎的奶粉品牌之列。
之所以會發生三聚氰胺事件，一定程度上是因為中國的食品安全監管部門仍舊監管不力，同時中國受到限制的媒體無法起到監督作用。客氣地講，法制變化無常，難以有效查處違規違法行為。
與小型奶牛場存在諸多問題的傳統觀念相反的是，三鹿的規模可能恰恰加重了問題的嚴重性。該公司由地方政府所有，設有一位黨委書記，這也是中國國有企業的普遍做法。一般情況下，這種安排使中共控制了政治上敏感的漲價等問題，但在三聚氰胺事件中，這卻使中共得以暫時掩蓋了此次牛奶污染事件，並避免了一次產品被全面召回的事件，直到2008年奧運會后。
如果中國政府確實想整頓乳製品行業，就應該加快中國向市場經濟的轉型進程。但中國政府目前所做的卻是組建更多的“三鹿”。政府扶植（有些甚至是政府直接擁有）的大公司理論上講可能更易于監管。三鹿就是這樣一家公司，但對三鹿而言，這樣的結構也使這類企業更容易出於其他目的而被操縱。
與此同時，進口外國奶制品是引入外國食品安全經驗的最快和最簡單方式，但中國政府在這一問題上的做法依舊讓人難以理解。近年來，中國有關部門多次以虛假的價格操縱指控為由把矛頭對準外國奶粉生產商，並要求外國奶粉企業滿足繁瑣的登記規定。由於中國禁止外商在奶企中持有多數股權，這導致外商對企業缺乏控制權，很多公司因此不愿進一步投資中國乳業。
一個現代化的中國乳製品行業擁有的大企業可能比過去更多，也可能更少。中國在市場化進程中已經取得一定進展。去年，奶價下跌及牛肉價格上漲等經濟因素促使很多小奶牛場殺牛退出，出現了一場大規模的宰牛潮。中國食品安全監管部門的警惕性確實也在慢慢提高。
但中國政府直接插手人為安排乳業發展的做法將使造成市場反應的“短路”。這是在用一個舊辦法解決一個因舊體系導致的問題。無論中國國家主席習近平承諾什么其他的宏偉經濟改革，都別指望消費者短期內會信賴中國的牛奶。
（Joseph Sternberg是《華爾街日報》“Business Asia”專欄的編輯。）
The Milk of Chinese Blindness
Joseph Sternberg
At about this time six years ago, thousands of Chinese babies were falling ill and several were dying after consuming milk powder tainted with an industrial chemical. Recent weeks have seen further advances in Beijing's ongoing effort to clean up a dairy industry whose faults were laid bare by that 2008 scandal. Don't expect those governmental exertions to work as advertised.
Those infants were sickened, and in six cases killed, by melamine, a component in plastics that had been added to milk powder to trick quality tests into showing higher protein levels than the powder contained. The conventional wisdom holds that this happened because China's dairy industry was highly fragmented. Financially strapped small farmers and middlemen supposedly conspired to cheat dairies with watered-down, chemical-laden milk, and the dairies weren't able to discover the fraud because their quality controls were too easily fooled.
Beijing has responded to this scandal the way it responds to most economic challenges: by going big. The State Council recently released a new roadmap for the industry that focuses on consolidation, with a goal of forming 10 large milk-powder companies by the end of this year, and shrinking that further down to five by 2018. The theory is that massive scale, combined with vertical integration, will make quality and safety control easier to enforce.
Some of China's new wave of big dairy firms are starting to list shares, including China Shengmu Organic Milk as early as this week in Hong Kong, saying they will use the proceeds to beef up their networks of dairy farms in China. Others are accepting private-equity investment for much the same reason; Jack Ma of Alibaba fame became one such investor when his PE firm Yunfeng Capital poured around 2 billion yuan ($322 million) into a unit of Inner Mongolia Yili last month.
In another classic China Inc. move, these newly enlarged dairy companies are going on overseas sprees. China's Bright Food in May bought a 56% stake in Tnuva, one of Israel's best-known dairy companies. Analysts hype the technology-transfer aspect of this deal. The Israelis will enlighten their Chinese bosses about safety best practices. Chinese baby-formula manufacturer Synutra, meanwhile, is investing EUR 90 million ($122 million) in building a new dairy factory in Brittany in France from which it will export back to China.
This all sounds great, if you believe that a fragmented production system alone was responsible for the 2008 disaster and others. But plenty of other countries have fragmented dairy industries. None of those markets has experienced in living memory a safety scandal of the type and degree that afflicts China so frequently.
China's failure lies not in the structure of its dairy industry but in the structure of its economy. Remember that Sanlu, the company at the heart of the 2008 scandal, was not a small family farm. It was one of the largest dairy companies in China, part-owned by New Zealand's Fonterra, and its milk-powder brand was among the most popular.
That contamination incident happened partly because China's safety regulatory apparatus remains weak and its unfree press can't serve as a watchdog. Rule of law is too erratic-to put it kindly-to function as an effective check on bad behavior.
Contra the conventional wisdom about the ills of small farms, Sanlu's size arguably exacerbated the problem. The company was owned by its local government, and had acquired a Communist Party secretary, as Chinese companies generally do. Whereas at other times this allowed the party to control politically sensitive price increases and the like, in the melamine case it allowed the party to conceal the contamination and avoid a general recall until after the 2008 Olympics.
If Beijing were serious about cleaning up its dairy industry it would hasten China's transition to a market economy. Instead, Beijing is creating more Sanlus. Large firms fostered, if not outright owned, by the government may in theory make the companies easier for regulators to monitor, but Sanlu was such a company and turned out to be easier to manipulate for other ends, too.
Meanwhile, Beijing continues to evince ambivalence when it comes to the quickest and easiest way to import foreign safety know-how-importing foreign milk products. In recent years, the authorities have by turns hounded foreign milk-powder producers on spurious price-fixing charges and subjected them to burdensome registration requirements. Many have been deterred from further investing in Chinese dairies by a prohibition on majority ownership and the resulting lack of control.
A modern Chinese dairy industry might feature more large companies than have previously existed, or it might not. China has made some progress in allowing the market to decide. Witness a major cull of the cattle herd last year as economic factors such as falling milk prices and rising beef prices induced many marginal farmers to slaughter their cattle and exit the business. China's food-safety regulators slowly but surely grow more astute.
But Beijing's attempt to stage-manage the dairy industry's development will short-circuit market responses. It is an old-style solution to a problem that was caused by the old style. Whatever other grand economic reforms President Xi Jinping promises, don't expect consumers to trust Chinese milk any time soon.
Mr. Sternberg edits the Business Asia column.
At about this time six years ago, thousands of Chinese babies were falling ill and several were dying after consuming milk powder tainted with an industrial chemical. Recent weeks have seen further advances in Beijing's ongoing effort to clean up a dairy industry whose faults were laid bare by that 2008 scandal. Don't expect those governmental exertions to work as advertised.
Those infants were sickened, and in six cases killed, by melamine, a component in plastics that had been added to milk powder to trick quality tests into showing higher protein levels than the powder contained. The conventional wisdom holds that this happened because China's dairy industry was highly fragmented. Financially strapped small farmers and middlemen supposedly conspired to cheat dairies with watered-down, chemical-laden milk, and the dairies weren't able to discover the fraud because their quality controls were too easily fooled.
Beijing has responded to this scandal the way it responds to most economic challenges: by going big. The State Council recently released a new roadmap for the industry that focuses on consolidation, with a goal of forming 10 large milk-powder companies by the end of this year, and shrinking that further down to five by 2018. The theory is that massive scale, combined with vertical integration, will make quality and safety control easier to enforce.
Some of China's new wave of big dairy firms are starting to list shares, including China Shengmu Organic Milk as early as this week in Hong Kong, saying they will use the proceeds to beef up their networks of dairy farms in China. Others are accepting private-equity investment for much the same reason; Jack Ma of Alibaba fame became one such investor when his PE firm Yunfeng Capital poured around 2 billion yuan ($322 million) into a unit of Inner Mongolia Yili last month.
In another classic China Inc. move, these newly enlarged dairy companies are going on overseas sprees. China's Bright Food in May bought a 56% stake in Tnuva, one of Israel's best-known dairy companies. Analysts hype the technology-transfer aspect of this deal. The Israelis will enlighten their Chinese bosses about safety best practices. Chinese baby-formula manufacturer Synutra, meanwhile, is investing EUR 90 million ($122 million) in building a new dairy factory in Brittany in France from which it will export back to China.
This all sounds great, if you believe that a fragmented production system alone was responsible for the 2008 disaster and others. But plenty of other countries have fragmented dairy industries. None of those markets has experienced in living memory a safety scandal of the type and degree that afflicts China so frequently.
China's failure lies not in the structure of its dairy industry but in the structure of its economy. Remember that Sanlu, the company at the heart of the 2008 scandal, was not a small family farm. It was one of the largest dairy companies in China, part-owned by New Zealand's Fonterra, and its milk-powder brand was among the most popular.
That contamination incident happened partly because China's safety regulatory apparatus remains weak and its unfree press can't serve as a watchdog. Rule of law is too erratic-to put it kindly-to function as an effective check on bad behavior.
Contra the conventional wisdom about the ills of small farms, Sanlu's size arguably exacerbated the problem. The company was owned by its local government, and had acquired a Communist Party secretary, as Chinese companies generally do. Whereas at other times this allowed the party to control politically sensitive price increases and the like, in the melamine case it allowed the party to conceal the contamination and avoid a general recall until after the 2008 Olympics.
If Beijing were serious about cleaning up its dairy industry it would hasten China's transition to a market economy. Instead, Beijing is creating more Sanlus. Large firms fostered, if not outright owned, by the government may in theory make the companies easier for regulators to monitor, but Sanlu was such a company and turned out to be easier to manipulate for other ends, too.
Meanwhile, Beijing continues to evince ambivalence when it comes to the quickest and easiest way to import foreign safety know-how-importing foreign milk products. In recent years, the authorities have by turns hounded foreign milk-powder producers on spurious price-fixing charges and subjected them to burdensome registration requirements. Many have been deterred from further investing in Chinese dairies by a prohibition on majority ownership and the resulting lack of control.
A modern Chinese dairy industry might feature more large companies than have previously existed, or it might not. China has made some progress in allowing the market to decide. Witness a major cull of the cattle herd last year as economic factors such as falling milk prices and rising beef prices induced many marginal farmers to slaughter their cattle and exit the business. China's food-safety regulators slowly but surely grow more astute.
But Beijing's attempt to stage-manage the dairy industry's development will short-circuit market responses. It is an old-style solution to a problem that was caused by the old style. Whatever other grand economic reforms President Xi Jinping promises, don't expect consumers to trust Chinese milk any time soon.
Mr. Sternberg edits the Business Asia column.
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