Thread: The View, from China

What’s the Chinese translation for “Idiot. Fuckin’ diversify”?

• Asia’s richest woman loses half her $24bn fortune in China property crisis

Asia’s richest woman has lost more than half her fortune over the past year as the crisis gripping China’s real estate sector continues to worsen, the Billionaires Index showed on Thursday.

Yang Huiyan, the majority shareholder of China’s largest real estate developer Country Garden, is down more than 52% to $11.3 billion from $23.7 billion a year ago, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In a sign that the crisis is spreading to developers previously seen as trustworthy, Yang’s fortunes were hit hard on Wednesday when shares in Hong Kong-listed Guangdong-based Country Garden tumbled 15% after the company announced it would sell new shares. raise cash.

Yang inherited her fortune when her father, Country Garden founder Yang Guoqiang, transferred his shares to her in 2005, state media reported.

She became Asia’s richest woman two years after a Hong Kong property developer’s initial public offering.

But now she barely holds the title, with chemical fiber magnate Fang Hongwei coming in second with $11.2 billion on Thursday.

Chinese authorities cracked down on over-indebtedness in the real estate sector in 2020, causing big players like Evergrande and Sunac to struggle to make payments and forcing them to renegotiate negotiations with creditors as they were on the brink of bankruptcy.

Buyers across the country, furious at the backlog of construction and the delay in the delivery of their properties, have begun withholding mortgage payments on homes sold before completion.

While Country Garden remained relatively unscathed from the industry turmoil, it spooked investors with Wednesday’s announcement that it plans to raise more than $343 million in stock sales, in part to pay off debt.

Proceeds from the sale will be used to “refinance existing offshore debt, general working capital and future development goals,” Country Garden said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

China’s banking regulator has urged lenders to support the real estate sector and meet firms’ “reasonable funding needs” as analysts and policymakers fear financial contagion.

The real estate sector is estimated to account for 18-30% of the country’s GDP and is a key growth driver for the world’s second largest economy.

Analysts have warned that the industry is caught in a “vicious cycle” that will further undermine consumer confidence following the release of dismal second-quarter growth figures that were the worst since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Last month, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Country Garden’s credit rating to junk and changed its outlook to negative, citing a deteriorating financial position and weakened access to long-term funding.