Market rise revives China-Africa resource deals

By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING (Reuters) - Recovering commodity prices are reviving Chinese investors' interest in African resource deals, after nearly a year in which infrastructure projects dominated Chinese investment in the continent, the head of Standard Bank's China operations told Reuters.

When Industrial and Commercial Bank of China took a 20 percent stake in Standard Bank in 2007, Standard Bank executives like Craig Bond expected its Chinese clientele to use the new banking channels into Africa to snap up resource projects.

Instead, resource deals have only perked up in the last few months, after a crash in commodities prices in the second half of 2008 left more opportunities for Chinese companies in infrastructure tenders, Bond said in Beijing on Monday.

"In the first six months of this year, Chinese companies ... were really waiting to see what was going to happen with commodities prices. They didn't want to overpay," Bond said in an interview.

"What's happened is the Chinese SOEs have now decided, 'OK, the market's starting to turn, we can't leave it much longer, we've done our homework and these are the specific resources we want to see'."

Oil and copper prices rose strongly in the first half of 2009, stabilised in the third quarter and ticked up again in October, reflecting renewed raw materials appetite from China where the economy is growing by over 8 percent this year.

Resources prices had crashed in the second half of 2008, as Chinese and global demand dried up and the global economic crisis caused a sell-off in futures markets.

ICBC is using Standard Bank's extensive network in Africa to help its clients, mostly Chinese state-owned enterprises, to access deals in the continent .