Buy bad loans along with groceries online

Alibaba-owned site offers customers in China distressed debt at hefty prices

Among the sneakers, diapers and pet food for sale on Taobao, China’s biggest e-commerce platform, is a listing that may take up a little more space in the online shopping basket.

For 4.15 million yuan ($610,000), customers on the site owned by e-retailing giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd can bid for the debt of a steelmaker from Zhejiang, a coastal province in eastern China. The company has failed to pay back a 9.95 million-yuan loan, including interest, so a distressed asset manager is auctioning it off to the highest online bidder.

It’s not the only bad debt for sale on Taobao, which translates roughly as digging for treasure.

Used by millions of Chinese to buy everything from clothes to food and electronics, the platform, known for its bargains, typically markets more than 1 billion yuan of soured assets a day, according to Bloomberg calculations. Recent listings include a portfolio of 118 non-performing loans from some companies in Yunnan province, a villa seized by a bank in the southern canal city of Shaoxing, and a property in central Beijing that’s also in default.

“Financial technology and e-commerce in China have reached a high level of sophistication,” said Xia Le, chief Asia economist at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA in Hong Kong. “Online platforms are levelling the playing field in the distressed debt market as it means everybody gets access to the same information.”

China’s embrace of e-retailing is helping it tackle another by-product of the country’s rapid economic evolution — the rise of bad debt.

Slowing growth and an uptick in corporate defaults have fuelled the market, with non-performing loans at commercial banks more than doubling over the past two years to 1.6 trillion yuan as of the end of March. As Beijing pushes lenders to find market-oriented ways of dealing with soured loans, interest in distressed debt has climbed, spurring banks and asset managers to look beyond traditional venues like auction houses and exchanges to dispose of the assets.

China Cinda Asset Management Co — one of the country’s biggest distressed asset managers, and the firm marketing the steel company’s debt — said last month that it is collaborating with Alibaba to set up a special section on Taobao to auction its wares. Though Alibaba declined to provide data on actual sales, the advertising of such loans shows how interest in the market for China’s distressed debt is developing.

Following Taobao’s lead, more than 50 other websites marketing their services to banks and other sellers of bad loans emerged in China in the first half of last year, according to a March report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. More than 20 financial institutions are listed as partners on Taobao’s auction platform for soured assets, including Shenzhen-based Ping An Bank Co, Beijing’s China Minsheng Banking Corp and China Citic Bank Corp.

But bad-loan investing isn’t like trading equities or even ordinary debt, which raises questions over the opening up of the market to rank-and-file investors.