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(Bloomberg) -- Country Garden Holdings Co. suffered another record loss in 2023 as the Chinese property giant pledged to clinch a deal with creditors on a debt restructuring plan by June.
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The embattled real estate firm reported a loss attributable to shareholders of 178.4 billion yuan ($24.3 billion) for the year, compared with a loss of 6 billion yuan in 2022, an exchange filing showed late Tuesday. Its loss narrowed in the first half of 2024 to 12.8 billion yuan, from 48.9 billion yuan in the same period a year earlier.
Country Garden says it expects to reach an agreement with offshore creditors on the debt restructuring plan in the first half of 2025, according to a emailed statement to Bloomberg News. It hopes to start work on bondholders signing restructuring support agreement “as soon as possible.”
The delayed results underscore how much Country Garden, once China’s biggest builder by sales, has struggled during a housing crisis that’s rocked Asia’s largest economy for more than three years. Dozens of developers have been hit, with another fallen giant, China Evergrande Group, already being liquidated in Hong Kong.
The builder blamed the 2023 loss on a “huge impairment provision” on properties under development and completed homes held for sale, according to the statement. Declines in gross margins and price cuts in asset disposal also contributed, it added.
Market sentiment on Chinese developers has worsened this year. A Bloomberg Intelligence gauge mainly tracking Hong Kong-traded Chinese developer stocks dropped as much as 1.4% on Wednesday morning, and is down more than 9% in 2025.
Earlier this month, Country Garden said it proposed debt restructuring terms with key banks that, if implemented, would enable it to achieve “significant deleveraging,” with a targeted debt reduction of as much as $11.6 billion. But a key bondholder group, which holds more than 30% of the company’s outstanding notes, has disagreed with the terms. Country Garden defaulted on dollar bonds in late 2023.
The company said its full-year loss for 2024 should narrow “substantially” from 2023, but it couldn’t predict when it would be profitable again.
“Falling sales are set to deepen its cash crunch,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kristy Hung and Monica Si wrote in a Wednesday note. Its cash buffer as of June was “a fraction of” the 406 billion yuan in trade and other payables,” according to the note.