{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Curiosity Chronicle","title":"The Evergrande Train Wreck","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":531,"description":"Welcome to the 645 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Friday. Join the 33,832 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Demand Curve!The Growth Newsletter by Demand Curve is my new favorite newsletter subscription.They interview hundreds of Y Combinator founders to find out what works. Then they pack each issue with actionable growth insights—so you can apply them to your startup or personal brand. It gives me new ideas every single week. I can’t recommend it more highly. Catch their next issue by signing up today.The Evergrande Train WreckThe calamity surrounding The Evergrande Group—the massively over-indebted Chinese property developer—is the train wreck that the world can’t help but watch.It’s fascinating—and carries a lot of interesting learnings on finance and business—so I wanted to share more about the situation with all of you curious folks out there!Here’s a breakdown on the business, background, and its rapid, very public demise:BackgroundThe Evergrande Group is a Fortune 500 real-estate developer with headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It was founded in 1996 by Hui Ka Yan in Guangzhou and scaled up over time from a small local player into a national behemoth.Today, it's big…very big. As recently as 2020, it had sales of >$100 billion and adjusted core profits of ~$5 billion. The below chart of its financials gives a perspective on its recent and rapid growth.At its core, it's a homebuilder business—developing from the ground up and selling properties to Chinese consumers. Its website states that it has over 1,300 projects across 280+ cities.But recently, it has pushed the boundaries of its homebuilding circle of competence, making investments in electric vehicles (Evergrande New Energy Auto), an internet and media production unit (HengTen Networks), a theme park (Evergrande Fairyland), a soccer team (Guangzhou F.C.) and a mineral water...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/4nO1oo__jWE5MpZsRfwEO_6q4py16kwv8WwJybce4FA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzMxOTcwLzE2NzEx/MzU5MDctYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}