Simon Catling
Asia's richest woman Yang Huiyan has lost half of her $23.7 billion fortune.
The co-chairman of property development company Country Garden Holdings Co. was worth around $10 billion more than fellow Chinese billionaires Fan Hongwei and Wu Yajun, according to Bloomberg.
However, in just seven months Yang’s fortune has more than halved to $11.3 billion, including a huge drop nearly $2 billion on Wednesday (27 July) alone.
She remains ahead of Fan, who now has an estimated $11.2 billion fortune and has lost far less due to being in the relatively healthier oil and gas industry.
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The mortgage industry in China has been hit due to a series of mortgage boycotts being taken by residents having seen cash-strapped developers fail to finish projects that are being lived in.
According to Bloomberg, Country Garden's unfinished projects so far haven’t been affected by the two trillion yuan ($296 billion) mortgage boycott that's hit the industry, but is clearly on the end of the blowback.
On Wednesday the company - once heralded as China’s 'role model' builder - said it was looking to raise HK$2.83 billion ($361 million) by selling new shares at a discount.
"Investors worry that the mortgage boycott will spread to Country Garden as they are seeing the boycott project numbers increasing quickly," said Kenny Ng, a strategist at Everbright Securities International in Hong Kong.
"The company still has significant debts and recorded a slower month-on-month growth in June sales even though China resumed work."
Huiyan's company's predicament is tied up in China’s effort to stem the rise of property prices and President Xi Jinping’s 'common prosperity', which has brought an end to a period of rapid growth in the industry.
It's meant that many real estate companies had to cease building projects, with no buyers to pay for them, and the hundreds of thousands of homebuyers who've stopped mortgage payments on halted projects has compounded the issue.
Country Garden was co-founded in Foshan by Yeung Kwok Keung, and grew over three decades as China's housing market boomed. By the end of last year, it had more than 3,000 projects in 299 Chinese cities as well as some in Malaysia.
Huiyan - Yeung's second daughter - picked up his stake in 2005 and by the age of 25 she was China's richest woman.
She became Country Garden’s vice chairman in 2012 and its co-chair in 2018.
Yang owns about 60 percent of Country Garden and a 43 percent stake in its management-services unit.