By Lewis Jackson, Joe Cash and Claire Fu

BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Zhang Xiong, a general manager at China’s state-owned Sichuan 15th Construction Company, delivered a simple message when he spoke to staff last month: stop losing money.

“We must strengthen institutional mechanisms to ensure that we ‘cannot and dare not’ make losses,” Zhang told a meeting similar to those held by at least six other state-owned firms nationwide in the past month.

The exhortation came amid a national campaign against deflation kicked off by President Xi Jinping in July, to help tackle supply in many industries that is far in excess of demand.

China’s solar panel makers can almost meet world demand roughly twice over, for instance, and profits are in freefall as manufacturers fight for market share.

Zh

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