Behind the Hundred Billion, Yuexiu Property's Changes and Constants

By Leju Finance, Zeng Shujia

In 2025, the real estate industry is still in an “adjustment period,” and Yuexiu Property has turned in a highly representative set of results.

Simply put, this is an answer sheet with a striking contrast between the “facade” and the “substance.”

On the surface, the profit attributable to shareholders has declined somewhat. But once you peel away the data’s outer layer, you find that its “backbone”—i.e., sales revenue, cash flow, and land reserves—remains very strong.

This phenomenon of “profit down, sales steady” is precisely a true reflection of the current differentiated market in the housing market.

And during the adjustment period, Yuexiu Property’s “second-curve” business that develops both residential and commercial properties is also a sample of how property developers survive and develop right now.

Performance Resilience

In 2025, Yuexiu Property’s full-year net profit after tax was RMB 1.78 billion, up 21.4%; profit attributable to equity holders was approximately RMB 0.6 billion.

This is driven more by a combination of the broader environment and the accounting settlement cycle.

Yuexiu Property’s explanation is that the real estate market is still in a deep adjustment period; it will take time for market confidence and expectations to recover substantively. Market differentiation among cities is obvious, and the year’s recognized sales gross margin for its annual sales business decreased year over year.

Against the backdrop of the wider environment, this is easy to understand. To sell homes, many projects have no choice but to sacrifice part of their gross margin, which naturally leads to lower recognized profits.

Second, in terms of the overall structure of recognized sales projects during the period, there were phased changes, which caused the average equity proportion of recognized sales projects for the year to decline compared with 2024. As a result, profit attributable to equity holders also decreased accordingly.

Put plainly, to diversify risk, it participated in some joint development projects. Although sales scaled up, the proportion of profits that ended up in its own pocket (equity share) declined on a phased basis.

However, although there was less money on the books, this is actually the result of its efforts to pursue steady development and proactively adjust its structure.

Last year, the gross margin of newly added projects for Yuexiu Property was around 15%, which laid a solid foundation for the subsequent restoration of its profits.

In terms of scale, Yuexiu Property is still clearly a “billion-level” property developer.

In 2025, it achieved contract sales of about RMB 106.21 billion (including sales from projects of joint ventures and associates), maintaining its position in the billion-scale camp for three consecutive years.

According to statistics from CRIC, Yuexiu Property’s full-year contract sales amount firmly ranked in the top 10 nationwide in the industry, ranking ninth.

Yuexiu Property’s resilience is also reflected in its “guarding” of the financial safety lines.

Last year, its financing costs were at a low level in the industry, and its weighted average borrowing annual interest rate fell further by 44 basis points to 3.05%.

During the period, it issued two domestic corporate bonds, totaling RMB 2.9 billion, with coupon rates ranging from 1.95% to 2.5% per year; it also issued a foreign dim sum bond of RMB 2.85 billion, with a coupon rate of 3.3% per year.

In the same period, Yuexiu Property recorded a net operating cash inflow of RMB 13.94 billion, maintaining net inflows for four consecutive years and sustaining strong “blood-making” capacity.

For the company’s “three red lines” indicators, all remained in the green. After excluding advance receipts, the asset-liability ratio, net gearing ratio, and cash-to-short-debt ratio were 65.5%, 54.9%, and 1.7x, respectively.

Its financial soundness has received broad recognition from rating agencies and international capital markets.

Strategic Deep Cultivation

Behind Yuexiu Property’s “solid” performance on the sales side lies its strategic deep cultivation.

Behind that is a relatively focused strategy. During the period, 85.6% of its sales came from core six cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and others.

In addition to destocking, stabilizing prices, and focusing efforts to drive destocking for incremental increases, Yuexiu Property also implements approaches of “precise investment to maintain stability through investment” and “one city, one policy,” to keep a development safety cushion in place.

Last year, it seized the pace of investment, deepened and expanded cooperation, and focused on high-tier core cities. Throughout the year, it successfully obtained 25 high-quality land parcels in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Xi’an, and Foshan, adding about 2.78 million square meters of land reserves and equity investment of about RMB 24.4 billion.

Among this, the equity investment amount in the core six cities accounted for 96.3%, and the structure of land reserves continued to gather toward high-tier cities. Its overall full-year investment premium rate was about 9.3%, meaning it secured high-quality land reserves at a relatively low cost.

As of the end of last year, Yuexiu Property had total land reserves of about 18.55 million square meters, with 94.4% of its land resources concentrated in first-tier and second-tier cities.

The Greater Bay Area, East China, the central and western regions, and the northern region accounted for about 42.6%, 17.8%, 23.7%, and 15.9% of the group’s total land reserves, respectively; the proportion of sellable value from the core six cities was about 75%, laying a foundation for future development.

In addition, Yuexiu Property also mentioned two key old redevelopment projects in Guangzhou.

One is the Lirenliandong project in Panyu. Currently, the project is progressing relatively smoothly and is expected to bring more than 690 billion in value; the other project is the Guangzhou Nanyang Electric Appliance Factory. At present, the overall demolition progress has reached 94%, and the signing rate has reached 98%.

At the beginning of this year, after 9 hours of intense competition, Yuexiu Group secured the Machang land parcel in Zhujiang New Town. In Guangzhou, this project will be a card-like, large-scale integrated complex, and in the future it is not ruled out that—at the group level—it may be injected into the listed company Yuexiu Property.

In 2025, Yuexiu Property’s Guangzhou home base, with a scale of RMB 29.1 billion, ranked TOP 2 on the local sales leaderboard. With the subsequent support from the Machang project, it will help consolidate Yuexiu’s leading position in Guangzhou.

The project has considerable value scale. After being injected into the listed company, it is expected to become a core engine driving Yuexiu Property’s performance growth over the coming years.

Toward the “Four Greats”

Yuexiu Property has developed a set of solutions for it to get through industry cycles—building “Four Great Enterprises,” namely good products, good services, good brands, and good teams.

In recent years, the company has been moving in this direction.

In terms of products, it continuously deepens its customer research system, implements the “4x4 good product philosophy,” completes standardized upgrades across four product lines, and advances the integration of design and construction as well as the upgrade of the “Yuezhi Zao” system. Multiple projects have won industry awards for design and quality, and Yuexiu’s “good homes” brand image has become deeply rooted in people’s hearts.

Under the strategy of “developing both residential and commercial properties,” Yuexiu Property’s “second-curve” business is also worth paying attention to.

Yuexiu REIT’s full-year revenue was RMB 1.86 billion, and its average interest-bearing rate dropped to 3.77%. Both S&P and Fitch have raised their outlooks to stable. Yuexiu Services’ revenue remained steady with growth: the area under management increased to 73.47 million square meters, and the collection rate for external expansions improved to 94%. Yuexiu Jianke achieved revenue of RMB 220 million; the area under management increased by 23% to 920,000 square meters, and it also obtained an EPC project for the Nan Sha Dongliu village redevelopment.

Relevant company: Yuexiu Property hk00123