China’s Country Garden looks to sell stake in chip maker CXMT as winding-up adjourned
- Investment arm plans to dispose of undisclosed stake amid debt struggles, as the developer gets a seven-week reprieve on a winding-up petition
Defaulted Chinese developer Country Garden Holdings is looking to dispose of a stake in chip company ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) via its venture capital arm, as it struggles to pare assets and work out its debts amid slumping home sales. The company also received seven weeks of breathing room on a liquidation hearing in a Hong Kong court.
Country Garden Venture Capital, an investment unit of Country Garden that was founded in 2019, is planning to dispose of its undisclosed stake in CXMT, according to people familiar with this matter, who did not disclose further details.
Country Garden Venture Capital holds a 1.68 per cent stake in CXMT, according to Chinese corporate data service Qichacha. In late March, CXMT raised 10.8 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) in a round of fundraising, pushing its valuation close to 140 billion yuan.
The cash-strapped developer reported on Tuesday that its contracted sales for May slumped 76 per cent year on year to 4.3 billion yuan, adding to a year-on-year decline of 83 per cent in April.
Country Garden had 1.36 trillion yuan in total liabilities on June 30, 2023, according to its latest published accounts. This included 258 billion yuan of bonds and bank borrowings.
The developer did not file its annual 2023 report by April 30 under Hong Kong stock exchange listing rules.
CXMT and Country Garden Venture Capital did not respond to requests for comment.
State-backed CXMT leads development of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in China, which are ubiquitous in consumer electronics, servers and data centres.
The company, founded in 2016 and based in Hefei, in eastern China’s Anhui province, represents China’s best hope to catch up with the world’s top three DRAM makers, South Korean giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and US-based Micron Technology.
Despite being hit by US export controls in 2022 targeting Chinese chip foundries, CXMT has been working on its own high-bandwidth memory chips tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) processors. It launched China’s first DRAM chip of the low-power, double-data-rate-5 type in November.
The US Bureau of Industry and Security’s October 2022 controls aim to cap China’s logic chipmaking capabilities at the 14-nanometre (nm) production level, DRAM at 18-nm and 3D NAND flash memory chips at 128 layers.
Country Garden Venture Capital focuses on investments in areas such as technology, healthcare and consumption, according to its website. It has invested in more than 90 companies, including more than 10 that have gone on to make initial public offerings, it said.
