By HUANG Yu
China Evergrande Group has plans to deliver 600,000 apartments this year and has offered contractors better deals or cash down payments so that they will start work immediately after the Spring Festival holiday.
Founder and chairman of the troubled real estate developer XU Jiayin told a company meeting on February 6 that the apartments would cover a total of 70 million square meters and account for almost half of Evergrande’s undelivered sold-out projects.
He said that Evergrande has some 50 billion yuan (US$8 billion) in a regulatory account with 80 billion yuan in uncollected sales and a further 90 billion yuan of property already on sale. An additional 56 million square meters of property is awaiting sales permits.
Facing close to 2 trillion yuan in debt, Xu said the company should never put its assets on fire sale as it would not be able to pay off the debt “even if we sold the whole company cheap.”
