So, Rene, let's start with a review of the bigger picture for listeners and explain why U.S. listings by Chinese companies have almost disappeared this year.

Well, primarily for two reasons.

One, on the side of Chinese regulators, which over the last six years, really, have grown significantly.

very cautious in terms of allowing Chinese companies to list first of all outside China.

And secondly, in the U.S. in particular, because of geopolitics, but also because of perceived or real national security implications on the Chinese side in particular.

On the U.S. side, if you go back to three years, every year there's been a number of small Chinese companies doing IPOs on NASDAQ.

I don't think there were any on NYSE, which I think has been much more conservative.

So any thoughts from you on what the regulator might be doing here? I mean, it does seem like in the past, industry leaders like Alibaba and Tencent, they've come under the regulatory spotlight, but usually it's in the areas where they're the big leaders and obviously abusing their leadership position, whereas in this case, It seems a little unusual that the regulators are starting to go after companies that were probably victims of Trip.com's anti-competitive behavior.

But

my understanding is that they're focused primarily on applications, AI applications that can actually help the manufacturing sector, for instance, and other sectors in China deemed critical for national security.

to be more productive, better performing, potentially help solve over time the issue of shrinking labor or at least shrinking population of working age and so on and so on.

And that has been, I think, their primary goal, at least in the open.

Now, Who knows what's going on behind the scenes and what China is doing with any part of AI that obviously may have, will have application in the military sector, defense sector, attack sector, whatever, whatever.

And that part of usually we don't see, but I'm sure that it's there and I'm sure that the government is heavily involved with that.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Do you think we're going to see even more of these solar companies starting to make this kind of move just to create some excitement or find a longer term solution? Better business?

Well, I mean, look, this is China, and we are two out of, you know, quite a large number of solar manufacturers, even if you just focus on the top ones.

So I would expect that some other companies will follow.

Probably...

in some sort of form being tied to AI, because that's obviously the big investment team of today.

Right, the hot area.

Whether it's software, hardware, or data centers, But I think that some will probably try to stay close to what they know best and what they've been building in terms of expertise for a long, long time and remain, you know, pure play investments.

Might this be a good opportunity to get in? I

Clothing, anyhow.

Yeah, clothing, active wear, whatever.

But the interesting thing is, you know, you can slap any label you want on anything.

I think that the more interesting thing is the comment that you made, that it had built its business and reputation on its dedication to corporate responsibility, sustainability, and so on and so on.

And In companies in the US in particular, but in Europe as well, in companies that are heavily, heavily focused on corporate responsibility, sustainability, environmental workers protection, and so on and so on, they usually end up with a very large portion of their workforce.

very focused on those issues.

And we've seen many cases across industries and so on.

You know, Rene, do you think that China's had enough of this experiment with private participation in its lending sector?