Produced by | Ruisi Network

On the evening of July 23, Greentown China (03900.HK) announced the final move in its nearly two-year governance transition.

Liu Chengyun resigned as Chairman of the Board and from his roles as Chair of the Nomination, ESG, and Risk Control Committees; Geng Zhongqiang stepped down as Acting CEO while retaining his Executive Director seat; Zhao Hui simultaneously assumed the roles of Board Chair and CEO, became Chair of the three major committees, and joined the Remuneration Committee; Jiang Feng, former General Manager of CCCC Financial Co., Ltd., was appointed Executive Director and Executive President.

This was far from an ordinary executive transition. Just over a month earlier, Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) had raided Greentown’s Hong Kong offices, investigating a former director. The significance of the personnel changes extended beyond mere title shifts—since CCCC Group’s equity stake in 2015, the 11-year dynamic of ‘control without authority’ had now been thoroughly rewritten (Note: translated as "completely overhauled" for natural English).

Eleven Years of Decentralized Governance

CCCC’s consolidation of control over Greentown was never a sudden shift but a multi-year gradual recalibration.

In 2015, CCCC Group acquired a 24% stake for HK$6.03 billion, becoming the largest shareholder. For the next seven years, Greentown’s operational control remained with a professional management team led by Song Weiping, while CCCC acted as a financial investor, providing credit backing for the developer’s financing and retaining oversight in the boardroom without interfering in daily operations.

This was a classic mixed-ownership model during the industry’s upswing: state-owned capital provided equity and credit enhancement, while the private team drove business expansion and scale, each fulfilling its needs. However, fundamental conflicts emerged from the start: professional managers prioritized product reputation and industry ranking, while the central SOE shareholder demanded profitability, turnover, and cash flow safety—inherently misaligned performance metrics. These dual-track tensions were not merely cyclical but rooted in the very structure of mixed-ownership reforms.

2022 marked a turning point. CCCC increased its stake to 29.8%, nearing Hong Kong’s 30% mandatory general offer threshold under the Takeovers Code, solidifying its position as the absolute largest shareholder and completing its transition from financial investor to controlling shareholder.

The industry’s deep adjustment amplified these misalignments. Amid frequent liquidity risks, ‘survival’ replaced scale as the top priority, accelerating CCCC’s pace of consolidating control. In July 2025, Song Weiping resigned as Co-Chair, exiting management entirely and ending the era of the old Greentown’s spiritual leader. In March 2026, Guo Jiafeng, CEO for nearly 30 years, retired, while Zhou Anqiao and Independent Non-Executive Director Zhu Yuchen also departed, clearing out core members of the old governance system.

During the same month’s personnel reshuffle, Liu Chengyun, a CCCC veteran who had served as Chair for a year, took over the Nomination Committee, and Geng Zhongqiang became Acting CEO, formalizing a transition structure focused on stable power transfer and centralized authority. From March 2025 to July 2026, Liu’s chairmanship lasted 16 months, while Geng’s acting CEO tenure spanned just four months. Their trajectories and subsequent handovers made clear: this team’s mandate was to ensure smooth governance transition, not long-term stewardship.

During the transition, core actions were clear: disrupt Greentown’s decision-making inertia by centralizing investment, financial, and HR authority at headquarters while fully embedding SOE risk control logic. The 2025 annual report showed progress toward stabilizing finances: cash and equivalents totaled RMB 63.2 billion, 2.6 times short-term borrowings—a record high; short-term debt fell to 18.6%, the lowest ever; and weighted average borrowing costs dropped 60 bps to 3.3%, ranking among the best among mixed-ownership developers.

Investment simultaneously contracted. In 2025, 50 new projects were added with RMB 135.5 billion in sellable GFA, 86% concentrated in Tier 1 and 2 core cities, reflecting a safety-first land acquisition strategy. Expense controls tightened, with administrative costs down 10.7% and sales expenses down 6.7% YoY. The concession business remained a cornerstone, with Greentown Management adding 35.35 million sqm in new concession area, maintaining its decade-long market share lead.

Yet short-term fixes masked deeper structural issues. The transition team’s focus on risk control and authority consolidation left untouched the core challenges of profitability and growth bottlenecks. The old Greentown’s ethos of ‘prioritizing product over turnover, scale over profit’ was merely suppressed by institutional constraints, not fundamentally restructured.

Profitability Struggles Amid Stabilization

While risks were contained, operational pressures persisted.

In 2025, Greentown’s revenue dipped 2.3% YoY to RMB 154.97 billion; net profit attributable to shareholders plummeted 95.6% to just RMB 71 million, with basic EPS falling to RMB 0.03 from RMB 0.63 in 2024.

The profit collapse stemmed primarily from RMB 4.92 billion in asset impairments and fair value losses. Excluding these, core development operations maintained positive gross margins. However, profitability pressures reflected three overlapping factors: industry-wide margin compression, impairment provisions for legacy projects, and widening losses from joint ventures and associates.

Dividend policy turned conservative. After paying a 2024 final dividend of RMB 0.3/share (totaling RMB 762 million), the board recommended skipping the 2025 final dividend to prioritize cash retention for operational safety.

Sales also contracted. In H1 2026, contracted sales from self-invested projects fell 25% YoY to RMB 60.2 billion; concession sales dropped 17.7% to RMB 34.5 billion; total contracted sales declined 22.5% to RMB 94.7 billion. While partly due to a high 2025H1 base and broader industry downturn, the declines also reflected deliberate investment contraction and optimization of non-core project supply. According to CRIC, this drop was milder than the 27% average decline among Top 100 developers, with self-invested business shrinking more than concessions—highlighting the priority on cash flow stability.

Industry rankings, however, improved. CRIC’s 2025 developer sales rankings placed Greentown second nationwide with RMB 251.9 billion in total contracted sales and fifth in equity sales from self-invested projects, climbing two spots amid the industry’s decline.

New Leadership’s Governance Approach

The transition was a temporary measure; installing a permanent team capable of mobilizing resources and setting long-term strategy became an urgent need. The pairing of Zhao Hui and Jiang Feng directly addressed Greentown’s core weaknesses.

Zhao’s simultaneous assumption of Board Chair and CEO roles broke Greentown’s nearly two-decade post-IPO tradition of separating strategic (Chair) and operational (CEO) leadership. The intent was clear: streamline decision-making, reduce friction between governance and operations, and directly implement the majority shareholder’s strategic vision at the business frontline.

Zhao was no outsider. Appointed Greentown China’s Party Secretary and Executive President in June 2025, he had fully participated in the previous organizational restructuring, gaining deep familiarity with the company’s project portfolio, organizational structure, and product DNA. His resume highlights a Tsinghua PhD in Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, professor-level senior engineer status, Special Government Allowance recipient, and membership in the NDRC’s PPP Expert Panel. His career spans leadership roles at CCCC’s East China Regional Headquarters, CCCC Investment, CCCC Real Estate Group, and CCCC’s Market Development Directorate, giving him both heavy asset project lifecycle management experience and expertise in SOE resource synergy.

Jiang Feng filled the capital operations gap. At 49, he rose through CCCC’s financial ranks from Head of Treasury to General Manager of CCCC Financial Co., Ltd., specializing in capital allocation, financing, and risk control. As the internal capital pool and financial platform for the group, CCCC Financial wields full-system fund Dispatch (Note: translated as "allocation") authority and resource synergy capabilities. His arrival means Greentown’s financial and financing systems will now deeply integrate with CCCC’s financial network, providing direct levers for debt structure optimization, financing cost reduction, and asset securitization.

Zhao drives strategy and execution; Jiang manages capital and financing. This duo continue (Note: translated as "continues") CCCC’s typical developer governance logic: safety first, profitability second.

Governance transition is just the beginning. The real test lies in balancing operational safety with brand heritage.

Market concerns center on whether CCCC’s stringent cost controls might undermine Greentown’s product foundations. The 2025 annual report showed Greentown achieved cost reductions through end-to-end Lean Management (Note: translated as "lean management") and supply chain efficiency gains, not by cutting engineering standards. Product excellence remained intact, topping industry rankings for the fourth consecutive year with 122 domestic and international design awards—proving cost controls did not sacrifice quality.

However, short-term balance does not guarantee long-term harmony. Rebalancing scale and profitability poses a more immediate challenge. Over the past two years, Greentown traded scale for financial safety. If market demand does not rebound significantly in H2 2026, full-year scale will likely continue declining, while RMB-billion-level net profits remain mismatched with its Top developer sales ranking.

A deeper variable lies in CCCC resource synergy. Over the past 11 years, CCCC’s infrastructure capabilities and Greentown’s development expertise failed to achieve Large scale collaboration (Note: translated as "large-scale synergy"), with only a few Yangtze River Delta TOD projects demonstrating limited linkage . The new team’s ability to break down systemic barriers and convert shareholder resources into market competitiveness will be the true litmus test of this personnel reshuffle.

The Mixed-Ownership Cycle and Productivism Dilemma

Greentown’s governance transition is not an isolated case.

Around the same time, Vanke underwent a similar governance shift. Shenzhen Metro, as the largest shareholder, gradually completed a full governance takeover, with core professional managers exiting decision-making roles and non-executive directors on the new board mostly drawn from Shenzhen Metro’s system. Financing changes mirrored Greentown’s: in 2025, Vanke’s weighted average financing cost fell to ~3.4%, nearly matching Greentown’s 3.3%, with both ranking among the lowest in the mixed-ownership sector—highlighting the convergence of credit dividends post-SOE takeover.

These parallel shifts by two industry benchmarks reflect a broader transformation in the sector’s underlying logic.

During the industry’s upswing, mixed-ownership’s core advantage lay in ‘SOE credit backing + market-driven agility’: SOEs acted as financial shareholders, providing credit support without operational interference, while professional managers pursued scale, product excellence, and market share, leveraging flexible mechanisms to capture incremental gains. This was the path taken by Shenzhen Metro’s entry into Vanke and CCCC’s stake in Greentown.

After the industry’s deep correction, this logic flipped entirely. Corporate competitiveness shifted from ‘expansion capability’ to ‘survival capability,’ with credit backing, funding costs, and resource synergy becoming far more critical than market agility. SOE shareholders had to move from ‘behind-the-scenes oversight’ to ‘frontline control’ to truly manage risks and safeguard liquidity. This was not a ‘power grab’ but a cyclical imperative for shareholder responsibility. When credit value outweighed management value, the era of professional manager-led expansion naturally receded.

For Greentown, this marked an inevitable identity shift. The idealistic product-centric era under Song Weiping and professional managers has ended; the road ahead will be more robust (Note: translated as "stable") but also more mundane. The June 2026 ICAC raid in Hong Kong further underscored this transition with a governance-level reality check: in a high-regulation cycle, compliance and risk control now outweigh impulses for aggressive expansion.

This is not a choice unique to Greentown. The collective governance shifts among leading mixed-ownership developers reflect a changed industry yardstick—no longer measuring who expands fastest or creates the most ultimate (Note: translated as "extreme") products, but who operates most stably and sustainably creates value.

Yet the market persists with a question: when ultimate (Note: translated as "extreme") product sentiment collides with an SOE system’s operational safety and profit-first priorities, can this product-centric developer maintain its ‘king of products’ status?

The answer lies in its H2 2026 land acquisition list and project product standards.

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