Chinese property mogul Sun Hongbin is no stranger to adversity, and so remained calm and collected when the market turned against him. He is now poised for a rebound. Jane Lewis reports
No one’s a winner in China’s property market. But in the race to buy time ahead of a hoped-for recovery, property mogul Sun Hongbin has stolen a march. While bigger rivals, such as Evergrande and Country Garden, remain “mired in negotiations with creditors”, Sun’s outfit, Sunac, has scooped a $10bn credit restructuring deal from investors including Ashmore Group and Barings. What apparently swung the deal – which comes 18 months after the company first defaulted on a dollar bond – was its clear plan and fair treatment of creditors. Sun didn’t go “missing in action” like some peers, a former bondholder told Bloomberg. He’s “one of the few chairmen who tried his best to do what he could even as the ship was going down”.
Slipping to the brink
Sun, 61, “knows a thing or two about living on the edge”, says Bloomberg. After a business dinner in Sichuan in September, he was standing on a riverbank when he slipped and fell more than ten feet into a ditch, and was rushed to hospital with bone fractures. “Confidants see the mishap as a metaphor for three harrowing years that brought his real-estate empire to the brink.” Like its chairman, they say, Sunac is now recovering and poised for a rebound.
If so, it won’t be the first time for this master of “dramatic comebacks”. In the early 1990s, while working for the tech giant Lenovo, Sun was “convicted of misappropriation of funds” and served four years in prison. He sprang back by launching into the property-development game, eventually building Tianjin-based Sunac into China’s third-biggest property empire, with projects in 62 cities, making annual sales of $92bn at its peak. In 2021, Forbes put his private fortune at $9bn.
Sun’s conviction was later overturned, but his trajectory “from jailbird to billionaire” made him “an inspiration to many”, noted the South China Morning Post in 2013. Although a naturalised US citizen, he bills himself as “a man who has successfully waded through the sometimes muddy waters” of the Chinese business world – surviving “more ups, downs and ups” than most. His determination to save Sunac was probably strengthened by another past business disa
