Country Garden shrinks its Malaysia staff as sales of Forest City’s property trickle to a stop amid Covid-19 travel bans

Country Garden Holdings, the largest foreign real estate developer in Malaysia, has trimmed the size of its workforce and sales team in the country by two-thirds over the past two years, as sales of its US$100 billion Forest City township near the Malaysian border with Singapore has slowed to a trickle.

The developer, based in the Guangdong provincial city of Foshan, has cut its Malaysia staff to 500 as of June following three rounds of retrenchments over the last 18 months, from 1,700 in 2019, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Another round of reassignments – where offshore employees are recalled back to China to find open vacancies at home – is likely to kick off soon, according to the people who declined to be identified. Staff who fail to settle into new jobs will have to leave the company, they said.

Country Garden said it has a “rather stable level of staff” at its unit in Malaysia and Singapore, where “it is normal to see staff leaving and joining the company due to the current economic environment,” according to its response to queries by South China Morning Post.

The lay-offs are the consequence of a triple whammy of hits on Country Garden’s proposition to sell offshore landed property to China’s growing middle class, since the company reclaimed its first square kilometre of land from the Strait of Johor that separates southern Malaysia with Singapore in 2013.

The first hit on the project was in 2017 when China’s government brought down the boom on offshore remittances of funds by Chinese citizens to deter capital flight. The second was a deterioration in relations between China and Malaysia, sparked by comments made by former premier Mahathir Mohamad who