PROPERTY developer CapitaLand celebrated 20 years in China at its Lunar New Year Spring Festival event at Raffles City Convention Centre on Feb 7.

China is one of its two core markets and the group's largest market outside Singapore.

Its China business is 39 per cent, or $14.2 billion as at Sept 30 - out of the group's total assets of $36.4 billion excluding treasury cash - up from 9 per cent from a decade ago.

CapitaLand has grown a diversified real estate portfolio of homes, offices, shopping malls, serviced residences and mixed-use developments in the country, since going to China in 1994.

Its business unit, CapitaLand China, has built more than 40,000 mass to high-end residential homes in the country, and in the pipeline is more than 60,000 homes.

As a shopping mall developer, owner and manager in China, CapitaLand has more than 60 malls with total gross floor area of about 6.4 million sq m.

It is big in the Chinese real estate fund management business as well, with 12 private equity funds and two Singapore-listed real estate investment trusts (reits) - Ascott Residence Trust and CapitaRetail China Trust.

Mr Lim Ming Yan, president and group chief executive, said that the firm will focus growth in five city clusters in China in future.

These are the Beijing-Tianjin, Guangzhou-Shenzhen, Chengdu-Chongqing, and Wuhan clusters; the Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Ningbo cluster.