Chinese developer Country Garden reveals $33 billion loss for 2023 in delayed report

BEIJING – Country Garden Holdings 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.

The embattled firm reported a loss attributable to shareholders of 178.4 billion yuan (S$33.3 billion) for the year, compared with a loss of six billion yuan in 2022, according to an exchange filing on Jan 14.

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 said it expects to reach an agreement with offshore creditors on the debt restructuring plan in the first half of 2025, according to an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg News.

The much-overdue results underscore how much Country Garden, once China’s biggest builder by sales, has struggled during a housing crisis that has 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 in 2025. A Bloomberg Intelligence gauge mainly tracking Hong Kong-traded Chinese developer stocks dropped as much as 1.4 per cent on the morning of Jan 15, and is down more than 9 per cent in 2025.

Earlier in January, 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 US$11.6 billion (S$15.9 billion). But a key bondholder group, which holds more than 30 per cent of the company’s outstanding notes, has disagreed with the terms.

Country Garden defaulted on dollar bonds in late 2023.

It said its full-year loss for 2024 should narrow “substantially” from 2023, but it could not 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 note on Jan 15. Its cash buffer as of June 2024 was “a fraction of the 406 billion yuan in trade and other payables”, according to the note. 

Country Garden said it has taken measures to ensure operations, including setting up a special working group to coordinate with the government, according to the statement. It will also ramp up efforts to mitigate debt risk in the medium and long term through seeking support from stakeholders to avoid financial risks. 

As of Jan 9, it has more than 200 property projects included in the government’s “white-list” lending programme and obtained additional financing of 1.52 billion yuan. 

The results come ahead of a court hearing over a so-called wind-up petition in Hong Kong on Jan 20. Creditors tend to pursue such actions to speed up the debt restructuring by expediting talks on a repayment plan. A unit of laminate maker Kingboard Holdings filed the petition in February 2024. 

Shares of Country Garden remain suspended in Hong Kong. The stock last traded on March 28, 2024, having lost about 97 per cent of its market value from its peak in 2018. BLOOMBERG