Chinese property developer Country Garden Holdings Co (碧桂園) yesterday said that it cannot repay on time a HK$470 million (US$60 million) loan in the latest sign of distress in the industry after Beijing clamped down on mounting debts in the industry.
The company said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it “expects that it will not be able to meet all of its offshore payment obligations when due or within the relevant grace periods,” including US dollar notes it has issued.
The company’s Hong Kong-traded shares yesterday sank 10.7 percent.
Photo: AFP
Its liquidity crisis suggests developers remain under pressure even after regulators lifted some controls on housing purchases to alleviate troubles in the industry.
The company recently received loans from banks, including a US$50 million loan from China Minsheng Banking Corp (中國民生銀行) earlier this year on top of a separate US$280 million loan from the Hong Kong unit of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (中國工商銀行) in December last year.
Country Garden said its sales faced “remarkable” pressure after the property sector went under “profound adjustments.”
Its sales slumped nearly 44 percent in the first nine months of this year compared with the period a year earlier, the company said.
Since there has not been an industrywide improvement in property sales, Country Garden said that “its liquidity position is expected to remain very tight in the short- to medium-term.”
Last month, the company made interest payments on two securities before the end of a 30-day grace period. As of June, it still had more than US$180 billion in liabilities.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS