When China Evergrande, once the biggest Chinese property developer, went public in Hong Kong in 2009, the country’s real estate market was red-hot. The frenzy over the company was so intense that for every lucky person who bought at least one share of stock, 46 others were shut out.
How times have changed.
Now a symbol of China’s real estate boom and bust, Evergrande was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday, four years after the company first warned that it was facing financial difficulties and two years after it sought bankruptcy protection.
Evergrande’s collapse, with $300 billion in debt, mirrors the slow and painful unwinding of China’s property sector. Government policies staved off a sudden crash, and instead delivered a grinding slowdown.
The housing downturn has not delivered the devastating shock that the United States suffered in the 2008 financial crisis, but it has been hanging over the economy for five years with no end in sight. Last month, new home prices dropped at their fastest pace in nine months and the prices of secondhand homes continued to slide, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China.
As the slump continues, the government has stepped in to prop up just enough indebted property companies to prevent a broad collapse. China Vanke, one of the country’s biggest developers, has repeatedly leaned on its top shareholder, the state-owned firm Shenzhen Metro, for loans to cover obligations from its $51 billion of debt. Shenzhen Metro has extended $3.4 billion over nine loans to Vanke this year. Vanke reported on Friday that it lost $1.7 billion in the first six months from January through June, 21 percent worse than a year earlier.
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