On the evening of August 12, according to mainland China time, the long-suspended China Evergrande suddenly announced that its stock listing would be canceled starting at 9:00 a.m on August 25. However, Evergrande left behind a huge debt black hole, with assets mostly being cashed out through dividends.
The announcement from China Evergrande stated that due to the company’s failure to meet the resumption guidelines of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the inability for the stock to resume trading before July 28, 2025, the Stock Exchange Listing Committee decided to cancel its listing status according to Rule 6.01A(1) of the Listing Rules.
According to the announcement, the last day of stock listing was on August 22, 2025. As per the Hong Kong Stock Exchange regulations, if a listed company is suspended for more than 18 months, it faces the risk of delisting.
China Evergrande’s last trading day was on January 29, 2024, which is nearing the 18-month deadline.
The delisting of Evergrande marks a milestone in the collapse of the Chinese real estate bubble. Among these real estate companies, Evergrande was the largest in scale and had the deepest impact. At its peak in 2017, the company had a market value of over $50 billion, but now its stock is nearly worthless.
China Evergrande was once the top real estate company in China and a Fortune Global 500 enterprise, with founder Xu Jiayin briefly becoming China’s richest person.
According to the first financial report, Evergrande was listed in Hong Kong with a market value of over 70 billion Hong Kong dollars in November 2009, making it the largest private real estate company listed in Hong Kong at the time and dominating the Chinese real estate market in 2016 with a sales volume of 373.4 billion yuan and total assets exceeding one trillion yuan.
In October 2017, Evergrande’s stock price hit a historical peak of 400 billion Hong Kong dollars, propelling the company to the top spot among global real estate developers.
However, the good times did not last long. Evergrande began to collapse in September 2021 following the Chinese government’s implementation of the “three red lines” regulations for real estate companies in 2020.
According to Evergrande’s mid-year report in 2023, as of June 30, 2023, the company’s total liabilities amounted to a staggering 2.39 trillion yuan, while total assets were only 1.74 trillion yuan, leading to insolvency and setting a record among Chinese enterprises.
In August 2023, Evergrande resumed trading officially, but its stock price plummeted, reaching just 0.16 Hong Kong dollars by the time it was suspended on January 29, 2024, with a total market value of approximately 2.152 billion Hong Kong dollars.
In September 2023, Evergrande announced that its chairman Xu Jiayin was arrested on suspicion of illegal…
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