China’s Country Garden says it’s back on track in Malaysia. Is it?

Despite a former premier calling the Forest City development a carve-out of Malaysian land to China and Beijing rewriting its foreign investment rules, the developer seems determined to press on

Reading Time:5 minutes

A visitor in the Forest City showroom. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 1:15pm, 5 Aug 2017Updated: 3:03pm, 5 Aug 2017

The first half of 2017 has not been particularly kind to Country Garden, the Chinese property developer behind the US$100 billion metropolis being built in a special Malaysian economic zone bordering Singapore that is dubbed the “next Shenzhen”.

The Hong Kong-listed developer building the sprawling Forest City development found itself at the centre of a political feud in January when the top government critic Mahathir Mohamad launched a blistering online campaign against it to ram home attacks against Prime Minister Najib Razak for embracing China.

Malaysia's former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been a strong critic of the Forest City development. Photo: AP

The Chinese home builder’s troubles then deepened in March when Beijing unleashed aggressive measures to clamp down on capital outflows.

That meant Country Garden – China’s third-largest developer – had to reconfigure a home market-focused sales policy that had seen some 70 per cent of its early Forest City sales snapped up by Chinese nationals. Now, as the unflattering headlines ebb away, the company is stepping up efforts to show it has come out of the tumultuous six months unscathed.

Yu Runze, chief strategy officer of Country Garden, says the Forest City project is ‘progressing very smoothly as planned’. Photo: Bloomberg

Yu Runze, its leading Malaysia-based executive overseeing the Forest City project, told This Week in Asia in e-mailed comments that “the project is progressing very smoothly, as planned”.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x