ABSTRACT
Private business in China shares with a number of state industries a tendency for firms to grow into conglomerates spanning a number of related and unrelated businesses. This can be seen in the results of the national survey of private firms conducted by the International Finance Corporation. Of the firms surveyed, 28 per cent had one subsidiary, 22 per cent had two, 27 per cent had three to five, and 24 per cent more than five. Thirty-eight per cent said that there was no connection between the goods or services produced by themselves and those of their subsidiaries. Thirty-three per cent reported that they were part of a conglomerate. The portrait of the average conglomerate to emerge from the survey was of one that employed 1127 workers, and achieved revenue of 150 million yuan (18 million dollars) and a profit of 20 million yuan (2.4 million dollars), making it roughly equivalent to an average size state-owned enterprise (International Finance Corporation 2000: 27-28).
