Blackstone Group LP agreed to sell Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc to China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co (安邦保險集團) for about US$6.5 billion, just three months after it purchased the US luxury-resort company, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The price is about US$450 million more than Blackstone paid for Strategic in December last year.
The New York-based private equity firm had been planning to sell individual properties in the portfolio before Anbang made a pre-emptive offer for the entire company, said the people, who asked not to be named because the transaction is private.
Both Blackstone and Anbang declined to comment.
The transaction marks a deeper push into US hotels for Beijing-based Anbang, which last year purchased New York’s landmark Waldorf Astoria. It would rank as the largest US real-estate purchase by a buyer from China, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Strategic owns 16 properties across the US, including the Four Seasons resorts in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Ritz-Carltons in Half Moon Bay and Laguna Niguel, California; San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado; and Manhattan’s JW Marriott Essex House.
Luxury and ultra-luxury properties have been among the most sought-after lodging types in recent years, partly because their locations and construction costs make them hard to replace. Demand for trophy hotels remains strong even as the US lodging industry faces the latter stages of a six-year recovery, with slowing growth in room rates and occupancy.
“US trophy assets continue to be in high demand by offshore investors, both Asian and Middle Eastern,” said Gilda Perez-Alvarado, a managing director at commercial broker Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “This is being driven by global market volatility, the continued strength of the US dollar and increased allocations for commercial real estate in an effort to diversify investment portfolios.”
Chinese investors have been buying foreign properties amid slowing growth at home and a desire for the perceived safety and value of US real estate.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day