China Evergrande Group (恆大集團) would deliver almost four times as many housing units to buyers this month as it had in the previous three months, chairman Xu Jiayin (許家印), or Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, said, as the real-estate behemoth grapples with massive debts.
Evergrande — drowning in US$300 billion in liabilities — has struggled to repay bondholders and investors after becoming ensnared in Beijing’s deleveraging crackdown on the bloated property sector.
However, the group — which officially defaulted on a major bond payment this month — has said it would be able to complete tens of thousands of units and pay off some debts.
Photo: Bloomberg
“Since the company’s troubles began, we delivered fewer than 10,000 units in September, October and November,” Xu told a company meeting on Sunday evening, according to a post on Evergrande’s WeChat account.
“There are only five days left this month. We must charge full steam ahead to guarantee the delivery of 39,000 units this month,” he said.
The new homes are across 115 developments, he added.
“Absolutely nobody at Evergrande is allowed to ‘lie flat,’” Xu said, referring to an Internet slang term for “slacking off” popular among young people.
In the past few months, the company has repeatedly said it would finish its unfinished projects and deliver them to buyers in a desperate bid to salvage its debts, despite having missed a payment of more than US$1.2 billion earlier this month. Earlier struggles to pay suppliers and contractors due to the debt crisis led to sustained protests from homebuyers and investors at the group’s Shenzhen headquarters in September.
Since then, the bloated firm has tried to sell off its assets and shave down its stakes in other firms, with Xu paying off some of the debts using his own considerable personal wealth.
The provincial government of Guangdong — where the firm is headquartered — is overseeing Evergrande’s debt restructuring process, but Beijing has yet to roll back any of the restrictions that prompted the housing crunch.
Having already blamed the firm’s woes on “poor management and blind expansion,” China’s central bank on Saturday vowed to protect the rights of home buyers and promote the healthy development of the real-estate market.
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
RSS