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Tenth in a series on Portuguese companies and investors in Asia — what they built, what survived, and what is still being built today.
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On the waterfront at Alcântara, in Lisbon, there is a large, plain, slightly forbidding building from the early 1940s. It was designed by João Simões Antunes as a port warehouse for bacalhau, the salt cod that Portuguese fleets brought home from the North Atlantic. Since 2008, after a conversion by the architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça, it has held the Museu do Oriente: Japanese screens, Chinese snuff bottles, Indonesian shadow puppets, crucifixes made in Asia for European buyers, and the Kwok On collection of Asian theatre masks and costumes.
The museum belongs to the Fundação Oriente — 東方基金會 in Macau, where it also keeps a house. The foundation was created on 18 March 1988, and the circumstances of its birth will be familiar to readers of the seventh instalment of this series. According to the Diário de Notícias, it was constituted "como uma das contrapartidas impostas pela então administração portuguesa de Macau" — as one of the counterpart obligations the Portuguese administration of Macau imposed in exchange for the exclusive gaming concession.
In other words: a licence written by a Portuguese government in Asia sent money back to Lisbon, and the money became a museum about Portugal and Asia, in a building made for cod.
It is a good place to start an instalment about capital moving the other way.
It started before 2011
The last instalment said that after 2011 the flow of capital between Portugal and Asia turned around. That is broadly true, and most of this post is about what followed. But the first signs of the reversal are older.
The first came from Macau itself. In 1987, after the death of José Teodoro dos Santos, who had run the Casino Estoril since 1958, Stanley Ho, 何鴻燊 — the public face of STDM (Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau) — acquired a majority interest in Estoril Sol, the company holding the concession. In April 2006 Estoril Sol opened a second casino, in Lisbon, in the former Pavilhão do Futuro from Expo 98. It is called the Casino Lisboa. The name STDM had given its Macau hotel in 1970 — 葡京, "the Portuguese capital" — had come home, owned by a Hong Kong family.
The second came from Japan, and it is the more substantial.
Ovar and Tramagal
In 1971, Toyota began making vehicles in Europe for the first time. It did so not in Britain, France or Germany, but in Ovar, a small town south of Porto, in partnership with the Portuguese businessman Salvador Caetano. Over the following decades the plant assembled Corollas, Hiluxes and Land Cruisers, among others, for some sixteen markets. Toyota's British press office, marking the fiftieth anniversary, put it simply: "Toyota's European production began in 1971 at the Ovar plant in Portugal." It is still running, with a line dedicated to the Land Cruiser 70.
Further south, at Tramagal on the Tagus, a truck plant founded in 1964 by the Portuguese firm Duarte Ferreira and the French maker Berliet began assembling the Mitsubishi Fuso Canter in 1980. Mitsubishi took the plant over in 1996. In 2017 it began series production of the eCanter, Fuso's first battery-electric truck. In 2023 it built some 11,800 trucks for thirty-two European markets, a record, and it is the largest employer in its region.
Neither was a privatisation or a bid for a strategic asset. They were factories, built with Portuguese partners by companies that wanted to make things in Europe. In the terms this series has been using, they look much more like Hovione in Taipa than like the concession companies. Japan came to Portugal the way the Villaxes went to Macau: with something to make.
Lisbon, December 2011
What happened after 2011 was different in kind.
In May 2011 Portugal accepted a €78 billion rescue from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The terms required the state to sell its remaining stakes in a number of large companies, quickly. To a degree few in Lisbon had predicted, the buyers came from Asia.
On 22 December 2011, the government chose China Three Gorges 中国三峡集团 — the state company that built the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze — to buy 21.35% of EDP, Energias de Portugal, at €3.45 a share: about €2.7 billion. The agreement came with a strategic partnership: two billion euros to be invested in EDP's renewable projects by 2015, and a credit line of up to two billion more from a Chinese lender.
On 2 February 2012 the national grid followed. State Grid 国家电网, bought 25% of REN, the company that runs Portugal's high-voltage lines and gas pipelines, for €387 million — a 40% premium on the market price. Oman Oil took another 15%.
Within six weeks, Chinese state companies held the largest stakes in both the country's main electricity producer and the wires that carry its power.
Fosun 复星
The most extensive investor of all was private. Fosun, 复星 — written 復星 in Hong Kong, where it is listed — was founded in Shanghai in 1992 by Guo Guangchang 郭广昌, and four fellow graduates of Fudan University.
In January 2014 the government chose Fosun to buy 80% of the insurance arm of the state bank, Caixa Geral de Depósitos — Fidelidade, together with the health insurer Multicare and a smaller insurer, Cares — for a billion euros. Fidelidade was, and still is, Portugal's largest insurer.
Nine months later it bought hospitals. In October 2014 Fosun, through Fidelidade, won a contest for 51% of Espírito Santo Saúde, narrowly outbidding the American group UnitedHealth at €5.01 a share. The hospital group was renamed Luz Saúde, after its flagship, the Hospital da Luz in Lisbon.
In November 2016 Fosun took 16.7% of BCP, the country's largest private bank, for €175 million, and later raised its stake to almost 30%. Its own statement called the deal "um passo importante para a consolidação da estratégia de internacionalização" — an important step in consolidating its internationalisation strategy.
An insurer, a hospital group, a bank: in less than three years Fosun had assembled a set of Portuguese assets that no Portuguese private investor had been able, or willing, to put together.
The same collapse, seen from Lisbon
Readers of the last instalment will recognise the name on that hospital group. When the Espírito Santo group collapsed in August 2014, its bank in Macau passed, through Novo Banco, to a Hong Kong-led consortium and became 立橋銀行. The same collapse released assets in Lisbon. The hospitals went to Fosun. And the group's investment bank, Banco Espírito Santo de Investimento, was bought in September 2015 by Haitong Securities 海通证券, of Shanghai, for €379 million, and renamed Haitong Bank.
One Portuguese family's failure sent Asian buyers into its businesses at both ends of the old route, in Macau and in Lisbon, within a year of each other.
What was for sale
Look at the list again — an electricity company, a national grid, an insurer, hospitals, banks — and something familiar appears.
These are licensed, regulated businesses. Their value depends on permissions granted by the state: to generate and sell power, to run the grid, to write insurance, to take deposits. They are, in a modern form, exactly the kind of asset this series has been tracing since the second instalment — rights rather than factories — and exactly the kind Portuguese companies held in Macau: the electricity franchise, the telephone licence, the bank of issue.
In the same years that Portuguese companies were selling licensed businesses in Asia to Asian buyers, the Portuguese state was selling licensed businesses in Portugal to Asian buyers. When EDP sold its stake in Macau's electricity company in 2024, the buyer at the Asian end was the Chinese company that had become EDP's largest shareholder at the Portuguese end.
Not a one-way street either
The reversal did not mean control simply passed east, and it has not stood still.
In May 2018 China Three Gorges offered to buy the rest of EDP, at €3.26 a share — a deal worth about €9 billion. It needed EDP's shareholders to remove a clause limiting any single shareholder's votes to 25%. On 24 April 2019 they declined, and the offer lapsed. CTG said it would remain a long-term investor, and it has: it held 21.55% after a capital increase in 2020, and remains EDP's largest shareholder. At REN, State Grid still holds its 25%; in August 2026 the Portuguese state agreed to buy back in, taking 13.7% from the Spanish Ortega family's holding company.
Fosun, meanwhile, has been selling. In January 2024 it sold 5.6% of BCP for €235 million. In May 2026 it was reported to hold a little over 20% and to have hired advisers to test interest in the rest, with the Belgian insurer Ageas among the possible buyers. BCP's chief executive, speaking about his shareholders, said what is quoted at the top of this post: he would like to keep both of his largest shareholders — one Chinese, one Angolan — and find more. It is not a bad description of what a large Portuguese company now looks like.
Korea, and a rescue
One of the most striking Asian purchases in Portugal was not a privatisation at all. Farfetch was founded in 2007 by the Portuguese entrepreneur José Neves, built much of its technology in Porto and Lisbon, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018 — the best-known company of Portugal's start-up boom. In late 2023, after heavy losses, it ran out of road. On 31 January 2024 the South Korean e-commerce company Coupang 쿠팡, completed the purchase of its business, providing $500 million in new capital. Neves stepped down a few weeks later.
The capital came from Seoul, and the company survived.
Back to factories
The newest chapter returns to where the Japanese began: making things.
On 20 January 2026, the government signed the contracts for a €2.1 billion battery factory to be built by the Chinese manufacturer CALB 中创新航, in the industrial zone at Sines. It is planned to produce 15 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion cells a year and to employ about 1,800 people, with first deliveries expected in 2027.
Sines is the town where Vasco da Gama was born. The birthplace of the man who first sailed from Portugal to India is now waiting for a company from Changzhou 常州, in China's Jiangsu 江苏 province, to make batteries there for European cars.
O que sobrou — what is here now
The Museu do Oriente, in a 1940s cod warehouse at Alcântara — Macau's gaming licence, turned back into a museum of Portugal and Asia.
Land Cruisers from Ovar, where Toyota first built cars in Europe in 1971, and Mitsubishi Fuso Canters from Tramagal, now electric, shipped to thirty-two countries.
EDP and REN, Portugal's electricity company and its grid, with Chinese state companies — 中国三峡集团 and 国家电网 — as their largest shareholders, more than a decade on.
Fidelidade and the Hospital da Luz, owned by Fosun 复星, and still among the best-known names in Portuguese insurance and medicine.
A site at Sines (锡尼什 in Chinese) waiting for a battery factory, in the town where Vasco da Gama was born.
Next
The money did not stop in Lisbon either.
In 2021 EDP's renewable-energy arm — a Portuguese company whose largest shareholder is Chinese — agreed to buy Sunseap, a solar developer in Singapore, and made the city the headquarters of its business across Asia and the Pacific. Capital that had come from China to Portugal went on, under a Portuguese name, to Southeast Asia — and a Portuguese company now runs its Asian business from a city a few hours' drive from Malacca.
Next in the series: EDP in Singapore — and a Portuguese company's new Asian headquarters.
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