Tag: Real Estate (Commercial)

Real Estate Giant China Evergrande Will Be Liquidated

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Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out. On Monday it became clear just how misguided that bet was. After two years in limbo, Evergrande was ordered by a court in Hong Kong to liquidate, a move that will set off a race by lawyers to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold. The order is also likely…

What Hefei, China’s EV City, Says About the State of the Economy

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Ultramodern factories churn out electric cars and solar panels in Hefei, an industrial center in the heart of central China. Broad avenues link office towers and landscaped parks. Subway lines open at a brisk pace. Yet at Hefei’s market for construction materials, which fills 10 city blocks, local merchants are gloomy. Wu Junlin, a vendor of doors, has closed two of his three stores and laid off all but one of his dozen employees. “I have been doing this for 20 years — after all these years, this year is…

Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds

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Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China. The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully,…

China Evergrande Soared on the Property Boom. Here’s Why It Crashed.

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In January, more than 100 financial sleuths were dispatched to the Guangzhou headquarters of China Evergrande Group, a real estate giant that had defaulted a year earlier under $300 billion of debt. Its longtime auditor had just resigned, and a nation of home buyers had directed its ire at Evergrande. Police on watch for protesters stood guard outside the building, and the new team of auditors were issued permits to get in. After six months of work, the auditors reported that Evergrande had lost $81 billion over the prior two…

Hong Kong Says It Calls the Shots, Not Beijing. Investors Are Wary.

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Isolated from the world and pulled closer into Beijing’s orbit over the past three years, Hong Kong is finding that its fortunes are tied more than ever to China. The city’s stock market, which is seen as a proxy for China’s economy, is among the world’s worst performing this year. The rivers of money that flowed into companies, minting new wealth, have slowed to a trickle. And there is the gnawing feeling that the once-vibrant international city that staked its reputation on being separate from China has itself become more…

What Retail Sales and Other Data Say About China’s Economy

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China’s trains, planes, stores and beaches were a little fuller last month than a year ago, and the pace of activity picked up at factories, particularly those making mobile phones and semiconductors. A batch of numbers released on Friday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed a modest improvement in the country’s overall retail sales and industrial production during August. A series of small steps taken by the government over the summer, including two rounds of interest rate cuts, seems to be yielding a slightly better-than-expected improvement in the country’s…

China’s Exports Fall for Fourth Straight Month

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The Background Economists had expected the August trade numbers to be slightly worse. A Reuters survey forecast that exports had fallen 9.2 percent in August from a year earlier, and that imports had dropped 9 percent. Exports had plunged 14.5 percent from a year earlier in July. Many multinationals, especially large retailers in the United States, have become worried about the dependence of their supply chains on China as geopolitical tensions have increased in recent years and as international trade disputes have intensified, particularly between the United States and China.…

China’s Property Crisis Is Rippling Through the Economy

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Once a beneficiary of China’s property boom, Lan Mingqiang is now an unwitting casualty of its unraveling. The financial troubles at one real estate company, Country Garden, have left him unable to pay the school fees for his son, who is starting seventh grade. Country Garden owes $21,000 to his company, which makes fences and billboards on construction sites. Now, with Country Garden days away from a default, this money is more out of reach than ever. “Nowadays, real estate is hard,” Mr. Lan said. He recently gave up on…

How A.I. Is Helping Architects Change Workplace Design

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“I’ve been a workplace designer for the last 24 years,” said the architect Arjun Kaicker. “I’ve seen more change in the last 24 months than in the whole of my career.” Mr. Kaicker co-runs Zaha Hadid Analytics + Insights, or ZHAI, a five-person team that uses data and artificial intelligence to design workplaces. The team is part of Zaha Hadid Architects, the firm founded by the influential architect Zaha Hadid in London in 1979. “The pandemic has really supercharged innovation in the workplace,” Mr. Kaicker said in a recent video…

Happiness is £4 Million Pounds

Chin@Strategy

While working to become a full-time reporter at an online publication in Beijing in 2021, Cici Fenfeng Wu was tasked with covering the country’s real estate market. The property market contributed tremendously to China’s economic growth, as well as to its economic imbalance, and she was assigned to do a profile of one of the investors behind the market. No one in the industry was willing to speak with her except Ou Chengxiao, who at the time was one of the country’s biggest real estate speculators. He made his fortune…