Firm to Auction its Material AssetsHuarong Asset Management Corporation, the country's largest non-performing assets handler, will soon auction its billions of yuan in real estate holdings and other material assets on line with the help of website companies, said Huarong President Yang Kaisheng on Thursday in Beijing.Agreements were signed on Thursday in Beijing involving Huarong, guaweb.com and China City Housing Network for the selling of Huarong's assets through their information platforms. Because of the fast development of the auction market and the Internet in China, this arrangement will help Huarong more effectively present its assets to potential customers and thus dispose of them more quickly, said Yang. Among the 506 billion yuan (US$61 billion) in non-performing assets that Huarong purchased from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) last year, 47 billion yuan (US$5.7 billion) was in the form of material assets. Of the material assets, 36 billion yuan (US$4.3 billion) was housing and land assets, the president of Huarong said. "Auction provides us with a major way to dispose of these holdings and recover some cash,'' he added. To Yang's joy, their vast real estate assets, although non-performing in bankers' eyes, are much sought after by real estate developers. "These real estate assets are great resources for us developers as a mature real estate developer must possess a large land reserve for future development,'' said Wang Shi, chairman of the China City Housing Network organization. He said members of the network, most of whom are major real estate developers in China, will invest around 12 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) this year in increasing their land reserves, and the demand for land may double in the next few years. Meanwhile, such co-operative real estate auctions will become a major target of guaweb.com, a major online auctioneer in China, said Lu Ang, general manager with the company. This form of auction is still in its infancy in China, with few auctioneers in the field. Source: China Daily |
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