As China’s real estate crisis has gotten worse over the past year, Asia’s richest woman Yang Huiyan has lost more than half of her wealth, a billionaire index revealed on Thursday.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Yang Huiyan, a majority shareholder in Country Garden, the largest real estate developer in China, saw her net worth drop by more than 52 percent to $11.3 billion from $23.7 billion a year earlier.

According to reports, Yang’s fortune suffered a significant setback on Wednesday when Country Garden, a developer based in Guangdong, announced it would sell new shares to raise money, causing its Hong Kong-listed shares to drop 15%. This was a sign that the crisis is spreading to developers once considered to be invincible.

According to official media, Yang received her money when her father, Yang Guoqiang, the founder of Country Garden, donated his shares to her in 2005. After the developer’s Hong Kong IPO two years later, she rose to the position of richest woman in Asia.

She is currently just just managing to cling onto that title, with chemical fibers tycoon Fan Hongwei coming in as a close second with a net worth of $11.2 billion on Thursday.

As Kreately had reported earlier about the collapse od real estate sector in China, major heavyweights like Evergrande and Sunac struggled to make payments and were forced to renegotiate with creditors as they teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in 2020 as a result of Chinese authorities cracking down on excessive debt in the real estate sector.

Buyers around the nation have started withholding mortgage payments for homes sold before completion out of anger over slow construction and delayed deliveries of their dwellings.

While Country Garden has been mostly unaffected by the instability in the business, it frightened investors on Wednesday when it revealed that it sought to raise more than $343 million through a share sale, some of which would go toward debt repayment.
Country Garden stated in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange that the sale’s proceeds would be used for “refinancing current offshore indebtedness, general working capital, and future expansion objectives.”

As analysts and officials fear the outcomes due to financial contagion, China’s banking regulator has urged lenders to assist the real estate industry and satisfy the “reasonable financing needs” of businesses.

According to estimates, the property industry makes up 18 to 30 percent of the GDP of the nation and is a major factor in the expansion of the second-largest economy in the world.

Following the revelation of gloomy Q2 growth numbers that were the weakest since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, analysts cautioned that the industry is trapped in a “vicious cycle” that will further erode consumer confidence.

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