China property crisis: Dexin joins list of developers ordered to liquidate in Hong Kong
- China Construction Bank (Asia), the trustee of Dexin’s note holders, filed the petition three months ago seeking repayment of a note worth US$350 million plus interest
Dexin’s share price fell 6.6 per cent to HK$0.09 in Hong Kong on Tuesday, before trading of its stock was suspended.
It had 64.4 billion yuan (US$8.9 billion) of liabilities in total as of the end of 2023, according to its annual report.
The wave of petitions for liquidation against Chinese home builders follows a slew of defaults that started in late 2020, when Beijing’s “three red lines” policy starved weak developers of funds and triggered more than US$160 billion of junk-bond defaults, according to a Goldman Sachs estimate.
China’s authorities have pledged to help distressed developers, recently unveiling a package of rescue measures that included a 300 billion yuan (US$41.4 billion) relending facility for repurchasing their unsold projects.
In late January, Justice Chan ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande, the world’s most indebted property developer, in a move that stamped out hopes that certain companies in the sector were deemed “too big to fail”.
Others, including Shimao Group Holdings, Country Garden Holdings, and Kaisa Group Holdings, are seeking to negotiate with their offshore creditors to avoid being liquidated when they come before the Hong Kong courts in the next couple of weeks.
Founded in 1995, Dexin China focused mainly on property development and sales in Hangzhou, the capital of China’s eastern Zhejiang province, and later expanded to the Yangtze River Delta region and some major cities in China, according to its website. It floated its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2019.
As of the end of last year, the developer operated 134 projects with land reserves amounting to some 10.1 million square metres across China, its annual report showed. Of these, 113 projects were located in the Yangtze River Delta region.
