Chapter 38 Figures in the history of the enterprise: the king of the world

After writing about Zhang Guoqing, I will definitely write about Guan Jinsheng.The big mistakes made by some entrepreneurs seem very strange to the latecomers. In the "327" national debt incident, Guan Jinsheng clearly knew that the opponent was a company directly under the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Finance had the final say on whether to subsidize interest. In the past 30 years, Chinese private entrepreneurs have rarely won in the face of "referee-cum-athlete" state-owned enterprises. He dared to gamble his life, and there must be ulterior details in it.I hope to have the opportunity to ask Guan Jinsheng face to face in the future.

When I write corporate history, sometimes I have the illusion that the place we live in is a "river and lake" rather than a "country". In June 1990, Wei Wenyuan was ordered to prepare for the establishment of the Shanghai Stock Exchange.He made his first business call to Guan Jinsheng, and Guan said with a smile on the other end of the phone, "I know that I will receive this call sooner or later, but I just don't know who it will be." At that time, all securities companies in Shanghai There are only three companies: Wanguo, Shenyin and Haitong. Among them, Wanguo, headed by Guan Jinsheng, is the largest.

In China's early stock market, Guan Jinsheng's reputation is second to none.He was born in a poor family in a small mountain village in Jiangxi Province. In 1983, he obtained two master's degrees in business management and law in Daxue, Belgium.After graduating and returning to China, he had nothing to do for a long time, and was sent to a "Shanghai revitalization research class" at the Shanghai Party School to "advanced studies". In 1988, the first joint-stock securities company was established in Shanghai, and the 41-year-old Guan Jinsheng was finally tapped out to serve as the general manager of this securities company with a share capital of 35 million yuan.

When Wanguo was founded, Guan Jinsheng first set his sights on treasury bonds.China began to issue treasury bills in 1981. For quite a period of time, due to the lack of liquidity, it was very unpopular. The State Council set up a treasury bill promotion committee for this purpose, led by the Ministry of Finance, with the Secretary-General of the State Council as the director, the People's Bank of China, the State Council The Planning Commission, the Central Committee, the General Logistics Department of the Military Commission, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League and the All-China Women's Federation participated together, and the lineup was unprecedentedly strong.Even so, selling treasury bills was still a headache every year-for grassroots officials at that time, there were two "difficult things" in the world, one was to engage in family planning, and the other was to sell treasury bills.Many local governments call for party spirit and require all party members and civil servants to buy it, and some governments and enterprises simply forcefully apportion it from their wages.Later, the underground trading of treasury bills naturally appeared. Some people bought treasury bills at a low price of 50% or 60% off, and some companies used treasury bills to reduce prices in disguise to sell backlog products.Due to the different purchase prices in different places, a profitable "black market" has formed.Although these acts were illegal, they spread day by day and became an irresistible trend. In March 1988, the Ministry of Finance was forced to formulate the "Pilot Implementation Plan for Opening the Treasury Bill Transfer Market", allowing treasury bills to be listed and traded. In April, seven cities, including Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Wuhan, took the lead in opening pilot programs, and in June, 54 more cities were released.

Guan Jinsheng was the first institutional brokerage to sniff out business opportunities from the circulation of treasury bills.At that time, banks across the country were not connected to the Internet, so the prices of treasury bills varied greatly from place to place. There were only a dozen or so people in Wan Guo.Once, he went to Fuzhou to purchase in person, and he bought 2 million yuan in treasury bonds as soon as he sold them. He rented a car and put it in Shanghai. Two big travel bags that couldn't fit, he carried one in each hand and flew back.At the entrance of the airport security check, he insisted on not letting the security inspectors open the travel bag for inspection. When he arrived in Shanghai, the bottom of the bag was broken, and he finally managed to get out of the airport by pulling and hugging.By 1982, Wanguo's turnover had reached 300 million yuan, becoming the largest securities company in China at that time, and most of its business came from treasury bond reselling and arbitrage.

In his self-report "Being a Millionaire", Yang Huaiding, a man of the Shanghai stock market in the early years, mentioned a detail of his joint speculation of treasury bonds with Guan Jinsheng: Just after New Year's Day in 1982, Guan Jinsheng told Yang Huaiding that he went to the Financial Management Office of the Shanghai Branch of the People's Bank of China and saw a document on the desk of the director Zhang Ning, which said that the 1988 treasury bills were going to be listed soon.If anyone knows the news, if you buy it at the price of 75 yuan on the black market, it may be 100 yuan when it is listed, and the profit will be 25 yuan. This is an opportunity to make a fortune.Therefore, Yang Wanwan became the authorized representative of Wanguo Securities, took a banknote counter of Wanguo, and bought it with great fanfare in his office at No. 1028 Haining Road. In a short period of time, he bought half of the Shanghai market. 1988 treasury bills.Guan and Yang's mad collection action caught the attention of the Financial Management Office. Zhang Ning rushed to Wanguo for a surprise inspection on a certain day. Heaped all the way from the floor to the ceiling.Zhang Ning came to check, but found nothing, Wanguo Securities escaped unharmed.A few months later, in 1988, treasury bonds were listed at a price of 104 yuan. As the two largest "treasury bond moles" in China at that time, Guan Jinsheng's Wanguo Securities and Yang Huaiding completed a thrilling and rich primitive accumulation.

On February 26, 1995, a major earthquake occurred in the international financial world. The British veteran commercial bank with a history of 233 years declared bankruptcy. An error of judgment by the manager. In January, this young man named Nick Leeson was optimistic about the Japanese stock market and bought a large number of futures contracts in places such as Tokyo and Osaka, hoping to make huge profits when the Nikkei index rose.Unexpectedly, at the end of the month, the Osaka and Kobe areas of Japan suffered a major earthquake, and the Tokyo stock market turned around and fell. The final loss of Barings Bank was as high as 1.4 billion U.S. dollars, and it had to declare bankruptcy.

Guan Jinsheng heard about the "Bahrain incident" at the end of January. He told Kan Zhidong of Shenyin Securities, another "securities tycoon" in Shanghai, "It will take about ten years for such a big incident to happen in China." .” No one expected that good fortune would be so tricky, almost at the same time as he said this, he single-handedly directed a catastrophe that was not inferior. At this time, Guan Jinsheng was in full swing. Under his management, Wanguo Securities started from a small office with 4 people and half a office. A star company with assets exceeding 1.2 billion yuan.Since the second half of last year, treasury bond futures trading in the Shanghai stock market has gradually become popular. Compared with the downturn in the stock market, the trading volume of treasury bond futures has been increasing day by day, and the prices of various varieties have also risen to make people envious. Guan Jinsheng, who started from reselling treasury bonds, will certainly not fall behind in this wave of market prices. In January 1995, the biggest suspense in the treasury bond futures market was whether the three-year treasury bond issued in 1992 would raise interest rates.The scale of this issue of national bonds code-named 327 is 24 billion yuan, which will mature in June. Its coupon rate of 9.5% plus value preservation subsidy rate means that every 100 yuan of bonds should be redeemed at 132 yuan when it matures. The circulating price on the website is around 148 yuan.At that time, the bank's savings interest rate was 12.24%, and the market generally believed that the return on 327 was too low. Therefore, it was reported that the Ministry of Finance might raise the interest rate on 327.

But Guan Jinsheng didn't see it that way.He believes that the current macro situation is overheated investment and chaotic financial order, especially the Shen Taifu fund-raising case that happened not long ago, so that the central government will adopt a conservative strategy in sensitive decisions such as raising or lowering interest rates. money to subsidize.Therefore, he ordered Wanguo to short 327. However, this time he bet wrong.His long counterparty is the China Economic Development Corporation, which is part of the Ministry of Finance. On February 23, the Ministry of Finance announced to raise the interest rate, and the 327 national debt will be paid at 148.5 yuan.

Once the news was verified, the market price of 327 government bonds began to rise all the way. In the morning of the same day, the price rushed to 151.3 yuan, an increase of more than 3 yuan from the previous day.At this time, Guan Jinsheng held a large amount of 327 futures contracts, and every 1 yuan increase meant that he would lose more than 1 billion yuan. ?Guan Jinsheng, who was cornered, blushed anxiously. He ordered that the price must be returned at all costs. Wanguo kept placing orders in the market.In the last 7 minutes before the market closed, Guan Jinsheng, who had lost his mind, put all his eggs in one basket and placed a total of 211.2 billion yuan in sales orders, forcing the price down to 147.4 yuan.

Guan Jinsheng's crazy behavior finally made the management intolerable.During this day's offense and defense, IWC released hundreds of billions of dollars in sales orders, which required at least 10 billion yuan in deposits. It was obviously impossible for it to have that much capital guarantee, and unscrupulous illegal operations were almost a matter of iron and steel.That night, the Shanghai Stock Exchange was ordered to announce that the transaction after 16:22:13—that is, before the moment when Guan Jinsheng used the day order to suppress the order—was abnormal. After investigation, it was Wanguo Securities who deliberately violated the rules to affect the settlement price of the day. , so all subsequent 327 transactions are invalid.Guan Jinsheng, who tried to snatch food from the tiger's mouth, was finally bitten by the tiger. The situation at that time was that, if calculated based on the closing price of 147.4 yuan, Wanguo made a profit of more than 1 billion yuan in the 327 treasury bond futures transaction, and according to the later decision of the Shanghai Stock Exchange , Wanguo suffered a huge loss of 6 billion yuan. On May 19, Guan Jinsheng was arrested. On September 15, Wei Wenyuan, the president of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, was dismissed due to poor control. In 1996, Wanguo and Shenyin merged and changed its name to Shenyin Wanguo. The 327 incident, which has turmoiled the Chinese stock market, has left many doubts. The focus of the dispute between the two parties is actually whether the 327 national debt will "raise interest rates".Many securities experts admitted afterwards, "I never dreamed that interest rates would be raised, and one rise is 5 percentage points." Irregularities. The results of Guan Jinsheng's trial did not come out until February 1997. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.Interestingly, people all over the world know that he was arrested because of the 327 national debt incident, but the charges against him were bribery and embezzlement. Taking advantage of his power, he took bribes of 294,000 yuan three times, and also misappropriated 2.4 million yuan of company funds for others to conduct profit-making activities. "The circumstances of the crime are particularly bad."This stock market tycoon who came out of a small mountain village in Jiangxi was on the verge of failure and was speechless. He did not entrust a defender, and he refused to be appointed by the court.