Gavekal Technologies

China’s latest five-year plan for energy disappointed many analysts because of its unambitious targets for scaling back fossil fuel use. This misses the point. The plan is important because for the first time, Beijing is formally committing to an energy system based mainly on non-fossil fuels, with traditional coal, oil and gas as backup stabilizers. Achieving this goal will take another couple of decades, but policymakers are already starting to look beyond brute additions of renewables capacity to the efficiency measures that will be required for success.

Changxin Memory Technologies' planned US$4–5bn Shanghai STAR Market IPO has raised concerns that China’s DRAM champion could flood the market with excess capacity and aggressive prices, but that risk looks overstated in the near term.