Property developer China Evergrande Group won the bid on Thursday for a plot of land in Guangzhou’s Huadu district with a transaction value of 2.206 billion yuan ($310 million).
This comes two days after it announced an aggressive sales target for the year despite a sluggish industry hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak.
The company (China Evergrande Group) will focus on controlling the scale of land reserves and reducing debt, with a target of reducing 30 million square meters in land reserves annually from 2020 to 2022. It will also lower interest-bearing debt by 150 billion yuan each year over the three-year period
Hui Ka-yan,
chairman of China Evergrande Group
The land, which covers an area of about 1,313hectares, will be used for residential development. It was sold to Evergrande with a premium rate of 34.83 percent.
The home builder set an 800 billion yuan sales target for 2020 and 1 trillion yuan target for 2022 when releasing its annual results on Tuesday.
The Hong Kong-listed company said property sales in the first quarter jumped by 23 percent to reach 146.5 billion yuan,due to its online marketing campaign which offered discounts on all its projects nationwide.
The company will focus on controlling the scale of land reserves and reducing debt, with a target of reducing 30 million square meters in land reserves annually from 2020 to 2022. It will also lower interest-bearing debt by 150 billion yuan each year over the three-year period, explained group Chairman Hui Ka-yan.
Evergrande’s upbeat outlook comes as the country’s real estate industry is suffering badly due to the coronavirus outbreak, which has resulted in the closure of sales centers and a decline in the number of homebuyers.
The total value of property sales in the country dropped by 35.9 percent year-on-year in the first two months of this year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
