BEIJING: China’s stocks rose for the fifth time in six days after health-care, technology and consumer-discretionary companies rallied, overshadowing declines for brokerages as Citic Securities Co. said it has been unable to contact two executives.
The Shanghai Composite Index added 0.4 percent to 3,539.04 at the 11:30 a.m. break as trading volumes slumped 35 percent from the 30-day average. China will cut the trading hours for stock-index futures contracts and introduce a circuit-breaker mechanism from January, the government announced Friday. Citic Securities fell 1.3 percent after it said two members of its eight-person executive committee, its highest decision-making body, can’t be reached.
President Xi Jinping’s government is trying to boost the role of privately owned technology and service businesses, while downsizing state-run industrial and financial giants. Official data show the growing importance of service industries, which make up more than half the economy and expanded at a 8.4 percent pace in the first nine months of 2015.
“The market is betting on the new-economy stocks and believes that these companies have pretty good growth potential amid China’s economic transition,” said Wu Kan, who is keeping his stock holdings unchanged as a fund manager at JK Life Insurance Co. in Shanghai.
