The share price of the ailing Chinese developer Country Garden has jumped by as much as a fifth after its creditors agreed a delay on debt repayments, offering some respite from the country’s crisis-hit property market.
The company agreed over the weekend to extend the payment dates on a 3.9bn yuan (£430m) private bond, to the relief of investors who had thought it would default on payments due on Saturday. Country Garden will instead have three years to repay the debt, after it won a narrow vote with the backing of 56% of its creditors, Reuters reported.
Its shares jumped as high as 1.05 Hong Kong dollars on Monday, up from 0.89 dollars on 31 August, the last trading day before a holiday. The deal also helped lift global markets, with European stocks hitting a three-week high.
The giant Chinese property sector, which accounts for about a quarter of the world’s second largest economy, has been hit by a run of crises in recent years, as developers have found themselves overextended after years of excessive borrowing.
As well as concerns over further unrest, the property crisis, which is unprecedented in China’s era of rapid growth, has raised fears over the country’s financial stability. Economic data suggests the Chinese economy is struggling on other fronts, with its consumer price index falling into deflation last month, and the country’s central bank has cut some key interest rates.
Beijing has responded to the crisis with scattered measures to try to restore confidence in the economy. On Monday, its National Development and Reform Commission, an economic planning agency, said it had established a new bureau to “promote the development and growth of the private economy”.
Country Garden was China’s largest property developer last year, having taken on that mantle from its rival Evergrande, which built up huge debts of more than $300bn (£238bn), before it defaulted in 2021 after government action to try to reduce borrowing in the property sector.
Investors in Evergrande have essentially been wiped out, but the company is still trying to restructure its debts even as the health of the broader industry comes under intense scrutiny.
The difficulties for Evergrande previously led to protests, because of Chinese developers’ reliance on homebuyers paying mortgages on properties that are not yet finished.
While Country Garden was not as indebted, it reported a deep 48.9bn yuan (£5.4bn) loss for the first half of the year in a stock exchange filing on Wednesday.
The difficulties have wiped billions off the fortune of Yang Huiyan, the company’s chair and majority owner who was once Asia’s richest woman. Country Garden’s Hong Kong-listed share price has fallen by nearly two-thirds this year.
