China's Evergrande Reports $81B In Losses Amid Real Estate Woes
Embattled Chinese real estate developer Evergrande has struggled to survive since 2021, but a sharper picture has emerged of the extent of its trouble.
A financial report released late Monday revealed Evergrande posted $81B in losses in 2021 and 2022 combined, The Washington Post reported.
The report underscores the developer’s troubles and once again raises questions about the health of the Chinese property sector — a critical element of the country’s economic health, with real estate making up a quarter of the Chinese economy’s growth, according to the Post.
The majority of the losses were from 2021, but the company took a $15B hit last year. In 2022, Evergrande’s total liabilities reached $335B, and it had $251B in assets, the Post reported.
The extent of the company’s financial turmoil speaks to problems present for the entire real estate sector and doesn't bode well for its future, experts told the Post. As a result of tightening on lending, under-construction apartments across the country have gone unfinished, and buyer confidence has slipped.
“Simple debt restructuring may be unable to save Evergrande,” Chen Xin, a finance professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, wrote on Weibo, a Chinese analogue to Twitter.
Evergrande’s troubles are “tantamount to disaster” for the company’s creditors, he wrote.
Evergrande’s shares on the Hong Kong Exchanges have been suspended since March 2022, giving the company just two months before it is delisted, the Post reported.
