Oriental Yuhong has taken Sunac to court in Hong Kong to collect on a debt.
On October 9, Sunac China (01918.HK) announced that its board had recently received a notice from board chairman and executive director Sun Hongbin, stating that the Hong Kong High Court has issued a registration order in a guarantee contract dispute involving Oriental Yuhong and Sun Hongbin. Under the court order, Sun Hongbin is required to bear joint and several guarantee liability for the principal debt of 310 million yuan owed by Sunac Real Estate to Oriental Yuhong, along with related capital occupation fees. However, Sun Hongbin is seeking legal advice and reserves the right to apply to have the registration set aside. Sunac said that Sunac Real Estate and Oriental Yuhong are negotiating a settlement.
Oriental Yuhong and Sunac began crossing paths more than a decade ago. At that time, the real estate industry was in an upswing, and Sunac was expanding its footprint in first- and second-tier cities, once ranking among Oriental Yuhong's top five core customers. As the regulatory cycle deepened, Sunac officially defaulted in May 2022, and repayment of supplier payments was also put on hold for a time. Afterward, Sunac also proposed a debt repayment plan to Oriental Yuhong. In March 2024, the Beijing Second Intermediate People's Court issued a ruling on debt-for-asset payment, transferring part of the property of Sunac's Chengdu Global Center InterContinental Hotel to Oriental Yuhong. This project was once considered Sunac's "best project," the largest five-star luxury hotel in downtown Chengdu, with a total floor area of 105,000 square meters, 975 rooms, a 1,150-square-meter conference room, and a 2,500-square-meter swimming pool, with an occupancy rate of 57% in 2023. In February 2025, Oriental Yuhong disclosed in a debt restructuring announcement that in 2024, the company obtained physical assets from Sunac and Xincheng through judicial rulings as debt repayment, corresponding to a total book value of claims of 1.813 billion yuan. Among them, Sunac-related debt repayment assets reached 1.7645 billion yuan.
But the above debt-for-asset measures do not appear to have completely resolved the debt problem between the two sides. On May 7, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oriental Yuhong was seeking to recover more than 400 million yuan through the Hong Kong courts; the target of the claim was Sun Hongbin, chairman of Sunac China. At that time, the report analyzed that if the court ruled in favor of Oriental Yuhong, Oriental Yuhong could obtain Sun Hongbin's offshore assets. Recently, the principal amount of debt that Oriental Yuhong is pursuing from Sunac's Sun Hongbin is 310 million yuan. This debt may be a continuation of the aforementioned debt collection action by Oriental Yuhong.
At the group level, Sunac's overall debt restructuring plan has now been implemented. In January last year, Sunac's 15.4 billion yuan domestic debt restructuring plan was approved by relevant creditors, and is expected to reduce more than 50% of its domestic debt, with the remaining debt extended for up to 9.5 years, and no repayment pressure within five years. In December of the same year, its offshore debt restructuring plan formally took effect, with approximately US$9.6 billion of its existing debt fully discharged and extinguished, making it the first large real estate company to essentially "clear" its offshore debt. After the debt restructuring was implemented, Sunac announced in August 2026 that it had established "asset management + asset operations" as its strategic transformation and upgrading direction, splitting its real estate business from the traditional integrated investment and development model into two independent business segments: asset management and project construction and operations management. However, this does not mean Sunac can solve its debt problems once and for all, as some newly added specific debts still need to be resolved one by one. On October 9, according to the latest disclosure by the group's mainland operating entity "Sunac Real Estate," between September 26 and September 30, it added 12 new overdue unpaid borrowings. The debt entities include Xingyang Weiyuan Real Estate, Weifang Rongmei Real Estate, Sunac (Qingdao) Land, and Meishan Global Century Convention and Exhibition Tourism Development, among others. The debt type is mostly bank loans, involving a total amount of 2.508 billion yuan. Currently, the legal representative of Sunac Real Estate is Wang Mengde.
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