HONG KONG: Shares of embattled property giant China Evergrande Group will be delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Aug 25, the firm said in a filing on Tuesday (Aug 12).
The company said the stock exchange’s listing committee had decided to cancel its listing after it failed to resume trading per listing rules.
Once China’s biggest real estate firm, Evergrande defaulted in 2021 and has become emblematic of a years-long crisis in the country’s property market that reverberated throughout the world’s second-largest economy.
A Hong Kong court issued a winding-up order for Evergrande in January 2024, ruling that the company had failed to come up with a debt repayment plan that suited its creditors.
Evergrande’s shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange were suspended that month.
In a progress report published on Tuesday, Evergrande’s liquidators, Alvarez & Marsal’s Edward Middleton and Tiffany Wong, said that they have sold about US$255 million of its assets 18 months into the process and taken control of more than 100 of the company’s subsidiaries.
Of the US$255 million worth of asset sales, however, only US$11 million came from assets held directly by Evergrande, while the rest were held by its subsidiaries.
The liquidators cautioned it should also not be assumed that the US$244 million derived from assets held by Evergrande’s units will all be available to it. Only US$167 million has been delivered so far.
They added that Evergrande’s debt load was bigger than the previously estimated US$27.5 billion.
Entities now under the liquidators’ direct management control had a total value of US$3.5 billion at the time of the liquidation order, Middleton and Wong said.
Evergrande’s collapse is the largest in China, lawyers say, and the liquidation has proved a challenge as the majority of Evergrande’s units and assets are offshore and many of them have been seized by creditors.
Evergrande and a handful of peers have been ordered to liquidate since 2021 as they failed to come up with viable restructuring plans or to gain enough creditor support for their plans.
China’s property market, once a key growth driver for the world’s second-largest economy, has been in a multi-year tailspin despite repeated government attempts to revive weak consumer demand.
Developers face deteriorating cash flow but their bondholders are resisting taking heftier losses on their investments, delaying negotiations between companies and creditors, restructuring advisers have said.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-evergrande-shares-delist-property-liquidation-5290631
