China’s state-owned financial institutions just escaped being forced to cover the debts of one of the country’s largest real estate developers.
Last week, Country Garden revealed that it had missed an interest payment worth around 66 million yuan ($9.1 million) for onshore bonds due May 9. Country Garden has already defaulted on its offshore debt.
Yet the payments due last week were for bonds issued under a Chinese scheme where state-owned financial institutions guaranteed debt issued by a handful of major private developers, including Country Garden. About 33.7 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) of bonds have been issued under the scheme, according to Bloomberg.
If the beleaguered developer failed to pay within a five-day grace period, then the guarantor—in this case, state-owned China Bond Insurance—would pay instead.
On Saturday, Country Garden said that it managed to find the money for the interest payments after all. That means Beijing won’t need to step in to help the developer pay its debts.
Analysts thought the decision was strange given Country Garden’s earlier missed payments, with Daiwa analyst William Wu calling it “unusual” in comments to the Wall Street Journal.
Country Garden, one of China’s largest private developers, didn’t rack up debt on the scale like those incurred by China Evergrande Group, whose default in December 2021 arguably helped to trigger the real estate sector’s current crisis.
But the sector’s woes became too much for Country Garden as home sales plummeted. The developer reported 3.85 billion yuan ($532 million) in sales for April, an 83% drop year-on-year.
Creditors filed a winding-up petition against Country Garden in Hong Kong court in late February. A similar petition made against Evergrande succeeded earlier this year, with a Hong Kong judge ordering the company’s liquidation.
Country Garden suspended trading of its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange in early April, citing delays in preparing its 2023 annual report.
China is still struggling with a slumping real estate sector, pressuring the country’s property developers as they try to restructure their debts. Home prices in China’s major cities fell by 1.5% year-on-year in March, according to official data. Prices in second- and third-tier cities fell by 2% and 3.4% respectively.
Last week, Beijing policymakers said they were considering plans to help “digest existing housing inventory,” or tackle the excess supply of homes on the market. One former statistics official last year estimated that China’s 1.4 billion people couldn’t fill all the vacant homes on the market.
Cities around the country are now scaling back their homebuying restrictions to juice sales. Hangzhou, the home city of major Chinese companies like Alibaba and Geely, scrapped all of its curbs last week; the city government will also allow non-local buyers to get local residency permits, according to the South China Morning Post.
