According to statistics published by the Ministry of Commerce, by the end of 2005, China had a net volume of direct overseas investment totaling US$43.9 billion (excluding finance); the accumulated sales volume of its overseas contracting projects topped US$135.8 billion.
Merger and acquisition of overseas enterprises -- mostly telecommunications, automobiles and resource development -- has become one of China's main overseas investment channels. In the past, enterprise acquisition in China was either one Chinese domestic enterprise buying another, or a foreign-funded company buying a Chinese domestic enterprise, and the deal was generally less than US$1 billion. But today, a merger or acquisition transaction normally exceeds US$1 billion. The largest China's computer company Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business in December 2004, China National Petroleum Corporations purchase of Petro Kazakhstan Inc. in October 2005, were all large cross-country merger and acquisition projects.
