How to Withstand China’s Property Meltdown

How to Withstand China’s Property Meltdown

Before Jack Ma got into trouble with Beijing for his free-wheeling ways, there was Wang Jianlin.

Once China’s richest man, the founder of commercial real estate giant Dalian Wanda Group Co. was forced to unload trophy assets by the government after an acquisition spree that hit an estimated $16 billion in 2016 alone. The sales turned out to be a blessing in disguise now that China’s property market has slumped.

Wanda was besieged in 2017 when Beijing cracked down on companies’ global shopping sprees, suspicious that spending overseas was a way to take money out of China. Painful as it must have been, Wang sold hotels, including luxury residential projects in London, to Guangzhou R&F Properties Co. and his tourism and theme park holdings to Sunac China Holdings, a deal that bought him $9.4 billion.

Here’s the outcome of the urgent deleveraging: Wanda’s dollar bonds average a respectable 93 cents on the dollar. Compare that to the industry’s average of 53 cents for high-yield dollar bonds, data compiled by Bloomberg Opinion show. We can expect a whopping 26% default rate in 2022, if all issuers with a weighted bond price below 50 go into delinquency, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates.

Three years