UPDATE 1 - PRESS DIGEST - China - Jan 15
(adds papers)
BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Chinese newspapers available in Beijing and Shanghai carried the following stories on Thursday. Reuters has not checked the stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
FINANCIAL NEWS
-- Seventy-five companies issued shares on China's A-share market last year, raising a total of 339.6 billion yuan.
CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)
-- China shut down another 84 websites on Wednesday for containing "pornographic and lewd content," bringing the total number of blocked sites in the month-long campaign against such content to 175.
-- Twenty-three Chinese workers have been deported by Saudi Arabia after being arrested earlier this week for striking to protest what they viewed as low pay.
-- The government should devise a plan to focus on the mental health of people caught up in the growing financial crisis, a local political advisor in Shanghai suggested.
PEOPLE'S DAILY
-- Gross regional product in China's capital Beijing is estimated to have increased 9 percent to over 1 trillion yuan ($146.3 billion) and per capita GDP surpassed $8,000 in 2008.
-- China will complete the construction of the massive Three Gorges project in 2009. Expenditure on the hydroelectric facility has amounted to 181.5 billion yuan as of late last year, or 91 percent of the budget approved by the central government.
-- China aims to cut emissions of sulphur dioxide by 1.9 million tonnes and chemical oxygen demand by 1.12 million tonnes in 2009, part of its five-year plan to reduce pollution. The Ministry of Environment Protection said the country would increase wastewater treatment capacity by 10 million tonnes this year and install desulphurisation equipment on coal-fired generators with a capacity of at least 50 gigawatts.
-- Sales of China's online game sector soared 76.6 percent from a year earlier to 18.4 billion yuan in 2008.
CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL
-- Monetary policy is expected to continue easing in the first quarter of this year and liquidity may become even looser in the first half but may tighten in the second half, partly because room for the central bank to ease policy further is limited.
-- Some fund managers say the stock market may have bottomed, but they will not put money into stocks aggressively until March or later, when the outlook for an economic recovery is clearer.
SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS
-- Sinoma International Engineering Co (600970.SS) said the value of a contract won by one of its units to build a cement plant in Syria, announced in October, had been cut by about 39 percent to $240 million plus 47 million euros ($62 million).
-- CITIC Securities (600030.SS) said it would take legal action if necessary to recover 492.3 million yuan it had paid in a Beijing property deal that was subsequently cancelled, plus 38.9 million yuan in interest. The brokerage had planned to buy an office building for as much as 1 billion yuan.
-- Guoyuan Securities (000728.SZ) said unaudited net profit plunged 77 percent to 524 million yuan last year.
-- Hainan Airlines (600221.SS) said it planned to sell its 7.69 percent stake in Yangtze River International Leasing Co to Tianjin Bohai Leasing Co for 45 million yuan. ($1 = 6.83 yuan)
