Sun Hongbin

Sun Hongbin is the founder of Sunac China Holdings Limited and long served as chairman of its board. Sunac listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in October 2010; after the listing, Sun Hongbin became the largest shareholder with a 51.85% stake, while Bain Capital ranked as the second-largest shareholder with the 10.1% stake it obtained through a debt-to-equity conversion.

In his early years Sun Hongbin led Shunchi Real Estate. In 2002 Shunchi aggressively bid for “land king” plots across the country; in 2003 its sales were claimed to have reached 10 billion yuan, and it boasted that it would become number one in the industry and surpass Vanke, but Shunchi eventually exited the market after its cash flow dried up. Former Greentown head Song Weiping once described Sun Hongbin as someone who “died once and came back to life”, who “can use many means to achieve his goals”, and said that “his imagination and creativity in the industry may exceed mine”. Zhu Jia, managing director of Bain Capital Asia, described Sun Hongbin as persistent and passionate, a workaholic with no particular hobbies who likes running at home and “doesn’t care for food or for gambling”; he also said that although Sun Hongbin has a strong personality, “having a strong personality does not mean being stubbornly self-willed”, that over five years of cooperation “in discussions, he (Sun) was fairly receptive to opinions”, and that when faced with a dilemma he would consult others.

Sunac’s cooperation with Greentown began in 2012. At the beginning of that year, Greentown fell into difficulty because of its high debt ratio and low-profit operating model, and Song Weiping successively sold equity and projects to rescue the company; Greentown first sold a 51% stake in Hubin Real Estate to Sunac Real Estate for 51 million yuan. In June 2012, Sunac acquired half the equity of nine Greentown projects for 3.372 billion yuan, and the two sides set up Shanghai Sunac Greentown Holdings Co., Ltd. (“Ronglv” for short). In 2013, Ronglv entered the top 50 Chinese property developers with online contracted sales of 15.5 billion yuan, with its Shanghai region ranking among the top three with online contracted sales of 11.207 billion yuan.

On May 22, 2014, Sunac announced the acquisition of a 24.31% stake in Greentown China from its shareholders for HK$6.298 billion (about 5.06 billion yuan), at a subscription price of HK$12 per share; owing to a dividend refund, the effective acquisition price was HK$11.46 per share, a premium of 49%. The shares came from Song Weiping (11.398%), Xia Yibo (3.190%) and Shou Bainian (9.725%). According to a Caixin report in July 2014, after the transaction Sun Hongbin replaced Song Weiping as Greentown’s actual controller, the largest property company merger in recent years; developers and investors such as Oriental International and Franshion had also approached Song Weiping, but Song Weiping insisted on choosing Sun Hongbin and publicly expressed his feelings with the words “the world is one family, and it should be led by the virtuous”. After the acquisition, Sunac’s high debt drew outside criticism, while Sunac executive president Wang Mengde said that at the end of the previous year the group’s net cash was about 16 billion yuan, the acquisition spending was within budget, and overall debt was under control.

On 12 March 2021, at Sunac’s 2020 results briefing, Sun Hongbin said when discussing property market controls, “I support the controls.” He explained that without controls, house and land prices would soar and the industry could not carry on; land prices would rise faster than house prices, leaving developers unable to make money and ordinary people unable to afford homes, benefiting no one. In his view, the controls were good for the industry, banks and the government, but not for every company, and would accelerate the divergence among developers. On the centralised land-sale system, Sun Hongbin believed it could not bring down land prices in the short term: “I think by the second half of the year or next year, the impact on land may be fairly large.”