''Xi'' () is a form of business organization in
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...
where a group of companies are controlled by a
private equity fund
A private equity fund (abbreviated as PE fund) is a collective investment scheme used for making investments in various equity (and to a lesser extent debt) securities according to one of the investment strategies associated with private equity ...
, forming an investment group.
Definition
The term can be translated as business group or a conglomerate.
However there is a connotation in the term of bending the rules since the companies in the group while tracing to an owner are not affiliated as a neatly organized entity.
In a dissertation on the subject a
Xiamen University
Xiamen University (; Southern Min: ''Ē-mn̂g-toā-o̍h''), colloquially known as Xia Da (; Southern Min: ''Hā-tāi''), is a national public research university in Xiamen, Fujian, China.
Founded in 1921 by Tan Kah Kee, a Chinese patriotic ex ...
student described the arrangement as follows:
"Very often strings of dysfunctional subsidiaries or intricately affiliated companies in the form “business groups” perform no substantial business activities other than acting merely as financial vehicles for one another. Spin-offs, shell-structures, holding companies are created at rapid rate..."
Comparison can be made to another, more formal kind of network based group structure in corporate China, the ''qiyejituan'' () in which the group of companies is registered as affiliated firms of a parent firm.
References
{{Business organizations
Economy of China