‘Forex reserve growth undesirable’

THE pace of growth of China’s foreign-exchange reserves was “not desirable” and controlling its rise should help improve the country’s balance of payments, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, was quoted Friday as saying.

“I should say that (the current rate of foreign exchange accumulation) is not desirable because the government already admits that they want to have a better balance of payments,” Zhou told the Emerging Markets magazine in an interview. At the end of March, China’s foreign exchange reserves rose to US$1.68 trillion, the magazine said. Zhou also said that the recent weakness in the U.S. dollar had yet to have a significant impact on China’s balance of payments.

Sinopec sees profit down more than 50%

CHINA Petroleum & Chemical Corp., also known as Sinopec, said Saturday it expected its first-quarter net profit to fall by more than 50 percent from a year earlier on higher crude oil costs.

Sinopec didn’t say in the statement how much the loss was. Its first-quarter net profit in 2007 was 19.42 billion yuan (US$2.77 billion) based on domestic accounting standards. The company is scheduled to announce the first-quarter result April 28. Sinopec said in a separate statement, also issued Saturday, that the government started subsidizing the company on a monthly basis beginning April 1 to compensate for low fuel prices.

Unicom adds 1.63 million users in March

CHINA Unicom Ltd., which lists shares in Hong Kong and Shanghai, said Friday it had added 1.63 million customers in March, up from 1.49 million new users in February.

The subscriber additions brought the company’s total number of customers to167.04 million at the end of last month, up from 165.41 million at the end of February. The company is the smaller of China’s two mobile operators in terms of subscribers. China Mobile Ltd. is the country’s largest mobile operator. China Unicom added 1.32 million subscribers to its Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network in March, boosting its total GSM users to 124.23 million from 122.90 million at the end of February. In February, it added 1.21 million GSM subscribers. Subscribers to the firm’s Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network totaled 42.81 million at the end of March, up 301,000 from 42.51 million in February. It added 280,000 CDMA subscribers in February.