The richest woman in Asia has lost more than half her fortune in just one year after China's property market took a battering.
Yang Huiyan is a majority shareholder in China’s biggest property developer Country Garden and she saw her net worth plunge by more than 52 per cent to $11.3billion (£9.3bn) from $23.7billion (£19.5bn) a year ago, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Yang inherited her wealth when her father Yang Guoqiangm, the founder of Country Garden, transferred his shares to her in 2005, according to state media.
She became Asia’s richest woman two years later after the developer’s initial public offering in Hong Kong.
At her peak, Huiyan's £19.5billion billion fortune eclipsed that of fellow Chinese billionaires Fan Hongwei and Wu Yajun, both worth around £10.8billion at the time, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Developers were previously thought to be rock solid, but the southeast Guangdong-based company's shares fell 15 per cent after it announced it would sell new shares to raise cash.
Chinese authorities clamped down on excessive debt in the property sector in 2020, leaving even behemoth companies struggling to make payments and forcing them to renegotiate with creditors as they edged closer to bankruptcy.
This has led to lagging construction and delayed delivery of properties, causing homeowners to withhold mortgage payments for homes sold before completion.
While Country Garden is not desperately struggling it is a sign to investors of the way things are heading. The company announced on Wednesday that it planned to raise more than $343m (£282.7m) through a share sale, partly to pay debts.
Proceeds from the sale would be used for “refinancing existing offshore indebtedness, general working capital and future development purposes”, Country Garden said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
The property sector is estimated to account for 18-30 per cent of the country’s GDP and is a critical driver of growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
Last year, for the 11th year running, Hong Kong was ranked the world’s least affordable housing market, according to an annual report by think-tank Demographia.
The median price of a home is more than 20 times the annual median household income, four times the ratio at which a place becomes “severely unaffordable".
Nearly eight per cent of people live below the poverty line.
According to the 2021 Forbes rich list, Hong Kong had the sixth-highest number of billionaires.
