Is China “uninvestible”?

Few chinese companies have caught the imagination of global investors like its technology firms. But they have suffered a catastrophic spell. At one point in March, they had lost about 70% of their value since their 2021 peak. On March 14th Alex Yao of JPMorgan Chase and his team published a set of gloomy reports on internet firms such as Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, Dingdong, an online grocer, and Netease, a maker of computer games. Mr Yao fretted about the industry’s prospects over the next year, owing to China’s economic slowdown, its regulatory crackdown on tech and its souring relations with the West. Some of the reports even described the sector as “uninvestible”.

That word caused a bit of a furore. JPMorgan lost its position as the lead underwriter for the listing in Hong Kong of Kingsoft Cloud, a Chinese cloud-computing firm. According to Bloomberg on May 10th, editors at the bank had in fact tried to replace “uninvestible” with the less apocalyptic “unattractive”. But some mentions slipped past them.