By WANG Yuhan
LI Changjiang, president and executive director of CG Services, the property management subsidiary of real estate developer Country Garden Group, has resigned for “family reasons.” Li later said on his personal social media account that he would continue working for the company as an “advisor.”
He will be replaced by XU Binhuai, who has been with CG for 7 years.
Li, 57, entered the property management business in 1997. Before joining CG Services in 2011 as general manager, he had worked for a number of property management companies. During his term, CG Services made its debut at the HKEX in 2018.
At its prime, the valuation of the company briefly reached HK5 billion (260 billion yuan, US billion), before crashing to its current level of around HK billion on the back of Li’s aggressive push for mergers and acquisitions after the company went public. In 2021, CG Services spent nearly 20 billion yuan acquiring equity in over a dozen companies.
Rumors about Li's resignation began when he failed to appear at this year's H1 performance release. However, at the beginning of H2, when CG Services' stock was at a low point, Li conducted two massive sell-offs, cashing out approximately HK$28 million.
In the first half of this year, CG Services' revenue stood at 21 billion yuan, with a gross profit of 5 billion yuan, down 4.3 percent. The profit was down by almost 10 percent. As of the end of the first half of the year when Li began his low-profile approach to public appearances, CG Services had a total of 12.7 billion yuan cash in hand, an 11.7 percent increase compared to the end of 2022.
CG Services' parent company Country Garden is struggling to pay debts and struggling even more to find a restructuring plan palatable to a very long list of creditors.
CG Services has previously said the company does not use cash deposits as guarantees for debt of “affiliated real estate companies.” Such a situation has not occurred, the company claims, and it will not happen in the future.
