Real estate in mainland China remains good, says Hang Lung Properties Honorary Chair Ronnie Chan

A big part of your portfolio in China is luxury malls. How is property leasing, the revenue doing and customer footfall affected by the sluggish Chinese economy? Well, so far so good. We’ve been growing for 24 years including 2023. We have never had a down year. Every year we gradually go up in total revenue, rental revenue. In the long haul, I think the Mainland China market is still a very good one. Economy is growing. Um technology is booming and frankly the more other countries hit at China it will only help China develop its technology faster. Necessity is a mother of you know of invention. You have no choice and so I think Chinese economy in the take a longer term rule should be OK. But in the next 2-3 years it will struggle knowing what you know about the Chinese economy and your expectations, how have you adjusted your investments there? When other people have no money, we should have a little bit of money now. Not only developers have no money, even local governments have no money. So. It’s a buyers market so to speak. And so in the short run I think we’ll be taking looking for those kind of opportunities thereafter when the economy recovers to some extent. You don’t want to wait for a full recovery before you act, you want to add. Before the full recovery comes, right? Maybe in 2-3 years? That we’ll be looking at more bigger lands purchases, land, capital commitment. But in the next 2-3 years, I think there’s a lot of very dainty little opportunities that may be quite profitable. You were considered a pioneer when you entered the mainland market. Does the Kingdom remind you of that? And is Honglong actively looking at Saudi as an investment opportunity? China is a 1.31 point 4 billion people market. Saudi has only 30 some million people. Of which only about 18 maybe our local people, so it’s a much smaller market. If my friends are interested to do business there, I’ll be very happy to help. But how long we have limited capital also everybody has, it’s constrained by capital, almost everybody is. And so we know the Chinese market. We have a team build up with a brand name there if you were to take a you know 5-10 year view. So and we do not just take a 510 year view, we also take a 20 year view. So I’d see no reason why we should go anywhere. So it’s not that we don’t want, we don’t like Saudi Arabia. It’s just that for us what advantage I have when I go to Saudi Arabia.