China's mountain of maturing debt puts a fear that nobody's talking about

For all the talk of China’s mountain of debt, defaults and deleveraging, there’s a chasm nobody is talking about. Here’s an alarming and frequently cited statistic: Chinese industrial companies have at least $124 billion of debt maturing over the next two years. Actually, it’s worse. 

They have another $34 billion of bonds with put options – giving creditors the right to sell back their securities or get a higher coupon – that can be exercised within the next two years. Lenders could be asking for their money back much sooner than companies and investors expect. Whether bondholders cash in is anyone’s guess. But they have an incentive to do so, given rising market rates. For borrowers, puts effectively bring forward the maturity date: In July-September this year, about $3 billion of such options can be exercised for the first time on debt that’s due two years later, in 2020.

China allows foreigners to enter $27 trn payments market

China will permit foreign companies to access its $27 trillion payments market, further opening up the world’s second-largest economy.
Foreign players can start applying for payment licenses and will be treated the same as local firms, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on Wednesday. Applicants must set up local units, establish payment infrastructure -- including disaster recovery systems — and store client information domestically, the central bank said.
Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday promised to protect the intellectual property of foreigners investing in its economy, as China seeks to avoid a trade war with the U.

S. Any entrants to the Chinese market -- apart from meeting stiff local regulations -- will also have to compete with the more than 260 firms that have received payment licenses including Ant Financial Services Group’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’s WeChat Pay.
“The domestic market is quite saturated with very strong domestic players, and it is relatively hard for foreign companies to get a piece of the pie,” said Iris Pang, a Hong Kong-based economist at ING Groep NV. “But there is a chance for them to compete in the cross-border payment market.”