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Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

nytimes.com

71–80 of 364 posts

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#71
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the approximate shortfall is.

300B of debt is the common number. shortfall unclear.

Allegedly 240B in assets, but who knows how real any of those are: https://www.reuters.com/business/embattled-china-evergrande-...

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#72
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hong Kong business is the business.

CNN has quotes to the contrary. Most of their Chinese assets are owned by Hengda Real Estate Group, which is legally independent. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/business/evergrande-ordered-t...

Interesting. It's unclear how you liquidate the parent company without liquidating subsidiaries (who is going to buy Hengda RE?) and it seems like legally the HK decision should be binding:

> Hong Kong and the mainland city of Shenzhen — where Evergrande is based — have a mutual insolvency recognition agreement, but it’s “effectively inoperative”

But China basically ignores HK in this.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#73
post #39

This is only the Hong Kong business. Which is why it hasn't had the impact you would expect.

What is the expected impact? And for whom?

Evergrande is a massive property development company. Real estate makes up a massive (20-25%) portion of China's GDP, as well as a very large portion of individuals' net worth. The expected impact is a cascading housing crisis where homes that people have already paid for don't get built, the company bankrupts, and millions of individuals (or their banks) each lose hundreds of thousands of dollars per unbuild home.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh! I got this one. They do not.

The bigger question is if China is going to prioritize local debt holders over overseas debt holder (everyone should take a massive haircut though), and what happens to the apartments they've sold but not built yet (since Chinese banks have lent money to people to buy those).

Is there that much chinese debt owned by overseas investors? I'd always thought the chinese deliberately insulated their financial system as much as possible to avoid foreign influence over their economy.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#75
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN has quotes to the contrary. Most of their Chinese assets are owned by Hengda Real Estate Group, which is legally independent. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/business/evergrande-ordered-t...

Interesting. It's unclear how you liquidate the parent company without liquidating subsidiaries (who is going to buy Hengda RE?) and it seems like legally the HK decision should be binding: > Hong Kong and the mainland city of Shenzhen — where Evergrande is based — have a mutual insolvency recognition agreement, but it’s “effectively inoperative” But China basically ignores HK in this.

I'm very naive about all of this, can I ask what this means?

Evergrande has been ordered to liquidate, on paper this means that the Chinese subsidiary Hengda must also liquidate, but China's just... not going to liquidate Hengda? So instead of Evergrande's creditors dividing up Evergrande+Hengda's assets only Evergrande's assets are going to be liquidated? If that's right, how does that work? Does Hengda get bought and the purchase price distributed to creditors? Does China just tell Evergrande's creditors "too bad"?

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#76

A couple of things to note: 1.) Why did it take Evergrande 3 years to liquidate? In western countries, liquidation happens in a few months. One should note that Evergrande did not get that big by itself; obviously it had the support of CCP elites to secure huge bank loans. Therefore, when it went bankrupt, the delay was to allow these elites to pull money/liquidable assets out of Evergrande. Thus after 3 years, Everg…

> This bodes very ill for creditors. Foreign creditors account only for $25B of the $300B liabilities for Evergrande. I'm sorry - but any foreigner who lent Evergrande money thinking this wasn't a huge risk is a moron. > This will accelerate the real estate price decline in all parts of China, on top of the 30-40% drop we're seeing in Tier 1 cities, on top of the 50-60% drop we're seeing in non-Tier 1 cities. Accordi…

Your math just says the median person doesn’t buy a condo. If only the top 10% can afford them, that’s still a huge pool of people.

Pretty sure median US income can’t afford a condo in NYC.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#77
post #31

The question is then whether they actually have enough assets to pay their debts.

Ooh! I got this one. They do not.

Yo dawg. I heard you like leverage. So I put some leverage inside your leverage to help prevent the tower of leverages from falling.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#78

A couple of things to note: 1.) Why did it take Evergrande 3 years to liquidate? In western countries, liquidation happens in a few months. One should note that Evergrande did not get that big by itself; obviously it had the support of CCP elites to secure huge bank loans. Therefore, when it went bankrupt, the delay was to allow these elites to pull money/liquidable assets out of Evergrande. Thus after 3 years, Everg…

> This bodes very ill for creditors. Foreign creditors account only for $25B of the $300B liabilities for Evergrande. I'm sorry - but any foreigner who lent Evergrande money thinking this wasn't a huge risk is a moron. > This will accelerate the real estate price decline in all parts of China, on top of the 30-40% drop we're seeing in Tier 1 cities, on top of the 50-60% drop we're seeing in non-Tier 1 cities. Accordi…

cursory searches on western media reviews shows 20%, 25%, 30%.

https://medium.com/alpha-beta-blog/even-beijing-home-prices-...

https://fortune.com/2023/08/17/china-home-sales-worse-than-o...

https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/tier-3-cities-ho...

My sources are from real estate agents in China.

Not sure why anyone would actually trust official numbers from China. China still claimed 5% gdp growth last year. pretty laughable.

Also, you can just watch what multinationals are doing. They have retail numbers from their Chinese stores. And it's pretty clear Japanese and Taiwanese and South Korean and American and European multinationals are all withdrawing.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#79
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN has quotes to the contrary. Most of their Chinese assets are owned by Hengda Real Estate Group, which is legally independent. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/business/evergrande-ordered-t...

Interesting. It's unclear how you liquidate the parent company without liquidating subsidiaries (who is going to buy Hengda RE?) and it seems like legally the HK decision should be binding: > Hong Kong and the mainland city of Shenzhen — where Evergrande is based — have a mutual insolvency recognition agreement, but it’s “effectively inoperative” But China basically ignores HK in this.

Depends on how they operate. Selling subsidiaries as going concerns or handing their shares to creditors of the parent are often options.

It's in no way a given that a subsidiary is insolvent just because the parent is.

This isn't unusual. E.g. when Commodore went bankrupt several subsidiaries continued to operate as long as they had stock, and the UK subsidiary even tried to organize a buyout of its parent.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#80

This is only the Hong Kong business. Which is why it hasn't had the impact you would expect.

This reddit comment explains this quite well: https://old.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1adnx32/evergran... > HK is sort of what NY is to the US. It is a peripheral region with some minor degree of autonomy but because it just so happens to house the Chinese version of Wall Street this means it’s judiciary is a little bit special when it comes to dealing with insolvency and other corporate issues. This means that i…

Comparing HK to NYC is very reductive lol.

Though it's kinda funny to imagine the Dutch held onto NYC until the 1990s after which there was some sort of unification process.

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