Ren Jianxin did something remarkable after announcing the biggest ever outbound acquisition by a Chinese company: he answered questions from reporters.

Judging by the opaque standards of Mr Ren’s peers, the men and women who run the country’s largest state-owned enterprises, it was by no means certain he would meet journalists. Not even after ChemChina made an all-cash $44bn offer for Syngenta, the Swiss agribusiness giant — a planned deal announced on Wednesday that if completed will vault the chemicals group into the top rank of the sector.

Less than a year earlier, when ChemChina paid €7.3bn for Italian tyremaker Pirelli, it took Mr Ren an entire week to come out of his shell and meet the media at his company’s Beijing headquarters. At that session last March, ChemChina’s founder and chairman came across as calm, confident and reserved. On Wednesday, by contrast, he was positively chummy, slapping journalists on the back as he insisted they help themselves to a buffet laid on at Syngenta’s Basel headquarters.