The property rights reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is the core of China’s economic system reform and an important path to build and develop a Chinese-style modern economic system. The reform encourages SOEs to diversify their ownership structure through various forms, truly giving play to the coordination and cooperation of all kinds of capital. The focus of existing research has gradually shifted from the equity dimension to the executive governance dimension, but the discussion on the matching between shareholders and companies at the business level is still insufficient.

This paper uses the text analysis technology to measure the similarity of business scope between companies and their shareholders to identify industrial strategic investors, and then studies whether the reform of SOEs at the business level can improve the operational efficiency of SOEs. The results show that industrial strategic investors with higher business scope similarity can effectively reduce the zombification of SOEs, and this effect is more significant when the shareholding ratio of industrial strategic investors is high. Mechanism testing finds that industrial strategic investors can exert more active supervision and governance effects and resource allocation optimization effects, manifested in their more active participation in shareholder meetings and appointment of directors to participate in SOE governance. Besides, companies with higher shareholdings held by industrial strategic investors have a higher commercial credit level, employment efficiency, and operational performance.

This paper shows that industrial strategic investors with relatively similar business scope can effectively improve the operational resilience and efficiency of SOEs. In addition to the mixture of equity and executive governance, the property rights reform of SOEs should also consider the coordination degree of shareholder operations at the business level. This paper expands the research perspective of SOE property rights reform and has important policy reference value for further promoting the mixed ownership reform of SOEs.