Hong Kong developers are offering discounts at new projects in the latest sign the territory’s housing boom is coming off the boil.
Country Garden Holdings Co (碧桂園) and Wang On Properties Ltd (宏安地產) are giving discounts of as much as 12 percent at their Altissimo project in the New Territories, a price list showed.
Employees of the two developers are granted an additional 5 percent deduction.
Lai Sun Development Co (麗新發展) has cut prices 10 percent at eight units in a project on Hong Kong Island.
Developers have been offering discounts and enticements including cash rebates and shopping vouchers.
New home sales might fall as much as 10 to 15 percent by value in the next year to 18 months, Moody’s Investors Service said on Wednesday.
That added to a chorus of bearish calls on a property market ranked the world’s least affordable, with some analysts forecasting prices would slump as much as 15 percent next year.
The discounts were announced after secondary-home prices last week dropped the most since 2016, sliding 1.3 percent from the previous week, according to the Centa-City Leading Index.
Country Garden, China’s biggest developer by sales, raised HK$7.83 billion (US$1 billion) in a convertible bond sale as it takes on higher-cost funding to push out repayments.
The company priced its sale of five-year convertible bonds with a 4.5 percent coupon, according to a Hong Kong exchange filing yesterday.
The proceeds are to be used to help fund a repurchase of zero-coupon convertible bonds due in January, while any remaining proceeds would be used to refinance offshore debt, the filing showed.
Shares of Country Garden, backed by billionaire Yang Huiyan (楊惠妍), fell as much as 5.3 percent after trading resumed in Hong Kong yesterday.
The developer has declined 34 percent this year, making it the worst-performing member of the Hang Seng Properties Index, which has dropped 9.4 percent over the period.
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
RSS