Highest -88.56B! The five biggest "loss kings" in A-shares, all involved in real estate

Byline|Mimi

This is @Bestie Finance’s 1,770th original post

As the former glory fades further and further away, today’s anxiety looks especially glaring.

About half of A-share listed companies have disclosed their annual reports, and when Mimi was tallying the data, she found a cruel fact: the top five on the loss-makers list are, astonishingly, all real-estate-related companies.

As shown in the table below: Vanke, M Eikang, Overseas Chinese Town, Jindi Group, and Shimao 3—these five together reported losses of more than RMB 150 billion.

First is Vanke. As a real-estate developer that has long served as a benchmark, nobody expected Vanke’s “bloodletting” speed to be this fast. In Mimi’s impression, this is not the company’s first giant loss; in 2024, it also lost RMB 49.48 billion.

Why did Vanke lose so much? In 2025, its sales gross margin was only 9.46%. In the past, it had stayed above 25% for a long time, with 29% even in 2020; over five years, it fell by nearly 20 percentage points.

Also in 2025, Vanke made large-scale provisions for inventory price declines—especially for projects in third- and fourth-tier cities.

In Mimi’s view, Vanke’s predicament has another structural reason: it is too “Vanke.” Industry leaders, the culture of professional managers, and an emphasis on a margin of safety—these labels are protective charms in an up-cycle, but in a down-cycle they become shackles.

Because Vanke doesn’t dare to cut prices and dump inventory as aggressively as private developers do, fearing damage to its brand; it also doesn’t dare to stop work completely to preserve cash flow, fearing default. The result is that it neither preserved cash flow nor protected profits…

But Vanke is not without cards up its sleeve—behind it, there is Shenfaixin, and also that Wanwu Yun still exists, with stable income from long-term rental apartments and logistics real estate… At this stage, holding on effectively means everything.

Next is M Eikang. A leading national home furnishing retail venue company. After it was acquired by Jianfa, it seemed the company’s fate was not reversed—if anything, it lost even more.

In 2025, M Eikang ranked second on the loss-makers list with a loss of RMB 23.72 billion. But its revenue was only RMB 6.582 billion, down 15.85% year over year. This means that almost all of its losses came from the asset side rather than the operating side.

In Mimi’s view, M Eikang’s business model, put simply, is: land acquisition, building home furnishing shopping malls, appraisal value increases, collateralized loans, and then acquiring more land.

Over the past decade, the “investment property” line item on its balance sheet had a high share. But in 2025, the valuation bubble in commercial real estate burst; shopping mall rental yields fell, leading to a one-time adjustment downward in fair value—this loss expanded by about RMB 20 billion…

With cash flow continuing to shrink and short-term debt piling up, M Eikang can be said to be under crushing pressure. The problem is also that if it sells assets to repay debt, it effectively means recognizing losses. If it doesn’t sell assets, it can’t hold cash flow. How does this trap get broken? It’s really too hard.

Third place is HuaQiao Town, a major culture-and-tourism real-estate player with roots in central SOEs. Under it are well-known cultural-tourism product lines such as Happy Valley and Happy Coast. In 2025, the company lost RMB 14.50 billion, and revenue was RMB 31.38 billion, down more than 40% year over year.

This is HuaQiao Town’s fourth consecutive year of losses. Over four years, cumulative losses exceeded RMB 40.5 billion, basically wiping out all the profit results from 2018 to 2021.

In 2025, revenue in the HuaQiao Town cultural-tourism segment was RMB 21.372 billion, down 21.71% year over year, and gross margin fell to 9.83%; the real-estate business segment revenue was only RMB 9.848 billion, down 62.7% year over year, with gross margin down to 7.62%.

As of the end of 2025, HuaQiao Town’s total assets were RMB 280.4 billion, total liabilities were RMB 226.0 billion, total interest-bearing liabilities were RMB 118.6 billion, debt due within one year was RMB 36.8 billion, while cash on hand was only RMB 23.2 billion.

Fourth is relatively unexpected: Jindi Group, which has long been known for its prudence.

In 2025, Jindi Group’s loss was RMB 13.28 billion, expanding 117.17% from the RMB 6.115 billion loss in 2024, setting the highest loss record since listing; revenue was RMB 35.86 billion, down more than 52% year over year.

Based on the financial statement data Mimi saw, Jindi Group’s net loss attributable to shareholders was RMB 658 million in the first quarter of 2025, cumulative losses of RMB 3.701 billion in the second quarter, RMB 4.486 billion in the third quarter, while single-quarter losses in the fourth quarter surged to RMB 8.794 billion, accounting for 66.2% of the full-year loss.

This divergence in losses across quarters mainly stems from the fourth quarter’s concentrated recognition of large amounts of asset impairment provisions, as well as the concentrated release of year-end sell-through pressure in the industry.

It’s worth mentioning that Jindi Group has used a cooperative development model for the long term, jointly investing with trusts, funds, and other real-estate developers, and splitting on a proportional basis.

In an up-cycle, this model allows relatively small amounts of own capital to leverage large scales; in a down-cycle, losses from cooperative projects need to be borne according to equity proportions, but cooperation partners may “pass the buck” and run away, forcing Jindi to provide backstop.

On the other hand, Jindi’s debt pressure is also not light. At the end of 2025, monetary funds were RMB 12.67 billion, but non-current liabilities due within one year were RMB 30.65 billion.

Finally is the fifth-biggest “loss king,” Shimao 3. Among the five companies, Shimao 3 is the most special one. It has already delisted and moved to trading on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ). In 2025, net profit was -RMB 9.762 billion, and revenue was RMB 5.267 billion.

Another special point is that Shimao 3 is only the commercial real-estate platform listed on Shimao Group’s A-share market; it is one wing of Shimao Group’s “big airplane strategy.”

For Shimao Group itself, 2025 was actually crucial. Full-year operating revenue was about RMB 28.4 billion, net profit was RMB 4.477 billion, achieving a major turnaround from the RMB 43.686 billion loss in 2024.

The core reason is that in July 2025, Shimao Group successfully completed an offshore US-dollar bond restructuring. Gains from offshore debt restructuring recognized in the period were RMB 69.52 billion. Combined with multiple-business synergy efforts, this drove an improvement in performance.

And as Shimao 3 is an A-share platform that has already delisted, its financing channels are basically cut off. The only remaining value is as a legal vehicle for creditors to pursue their debts.

For investors, holding Shimao 3 shares has essentially no meaningful value. Even though it trades three times per week, both the trading price and trading volume are extremely sluggish, with liquidity close to zero.

In summary, Mimi sees that the losses of the five real-estate-related companies are consistent. For example, asset revaluation. Over the past decade, real-estate companies recorded a large amount of low-liquidity assets into profits at fair value; when the market requires re-evaluation based on liquidation value, the difference is the loss.

Another thing that needs vigilance is cash-flow conditions. Among the five, only M Eikang’s operating cash flow per share is positive, and that amount is far from enough to cover expenses such as interest. Remember: cash flow is the company’s lifeline for survival.

In 2026, the roster of A-share loss-makers will very likely continue to be updated. But what can be confirmed is that real-estate developers no longer enjoy the implicit backstop of “too big to fail.” The market’s clearing process is still ongoing.

This article is for discussion and analysis only and does not constitute investment advice. Unless otherwise stated, the images in this article are all from East Money; hereby we state and appreciate this!

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