HUI KA YAN

Hui Ka Yan (also known as Xu Jiayin in Mandarin) was born in 1958 in Taikang County, Henan — a region with little industry and high poverty. His mother died when he was eight months old.

He grew up with his grandmother and father, who was a village administrator. He went to Wuhan University of Science and Technology, studied metallurgy, and graduated in 1982.

His early career was at a state-owned steel company in Henan, where he worked his way up to a management role. In 1992, he moved to Guangzhou, which was the center of China's emerging private economy.

He worked in a property company, learned the business from the inside, and in 1996 founded Guangzhou Evergrande Real Estate Company with minimal capital.

The Evergrande model was straightforward and aggressive: sell apartments before they were built, use the deposits to fund construction, take on bank debt to buy more land, and reinvest everything into growth. During China's explosive urbanization of the 2000s and 2010s, this model worked because apartment prices kept rising.

Evergrande grew from one project in Guangzhou to a presence across 280 Chinese cities, employing 280,000 people directly and millions in its supply chain.

In 2009, Evergrande listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The IPO raised billions and gave Hui a platform for further expansion.

By 2017, Evergrande was the largest property developer in China by sales. By 2021, Hui Ka Yan was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in China, with a net worth of approximately $42 billion.

The cracks appeared in 2021 when Evergrande began missing payments to suppliers. By September 2021, it had defaulted on offshore bond interest — the first signal of what became a full-scale crisis.

Chinese regulators had implemented the 'three red lines' policy in 2020, restricting how much new debt developers could take on based on their financial ratios. Evergrande, which had spent decades leveraging to the maximum, failed all three.

New borrowing stopped. The refinancing machine broke.

Evergrande's total liabilities hit $330 billion — the largest corporate debt load in history. The company had sold deposits for over 1.2 million apartments that had not yet been delivered.

Hui Ka Yan was detained by Chinese police in September 2023. In January 2024, a Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande to liquidate.

Hui was formally charged and prosecuted in China in 2024.

Evergrande Group (HKSE: 3333) was Hui's primary vehicle — at peak, China's largest property developer by contracted sales, with operations in over 280 cities. Beyond core real estate, Hui expanded into electric vehicles (China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group), Evergrande Health (senior living and medical), Evergrande Spring (bottled water), Guangzhou FC (soccer club, now Guangzhou FC following sponsor exit), and theme parks across China.

The diversification was funded by the same debt machine as the property business — when the property stopped cash-flowing, everything dependent on it collapsed simultaneously.

Hui Ka Yan built Evergrande on a single, leveraged-to-the-maximum bet on China's urbanization story. The strategy was not complicated: buy land in every city that China's growing middle class was moving to, sell apartments fast and cheap (Evergrande competed on price more than prestige), use the proceeds to buy more land, and keep the debt growing as long as the asset values kept rising.

The model required an ever-expanding pool of buyers, rising prices, and continued access to cheap credit. For 25 years, China provided all three.

In 2020, Beijing changed the rules. The 'three red lines' debt limits combined with a cooling economy made the model unviable almost overnight.

There was no Plan B.

Building Evergrande from a single Guangzhou project in 1996 to China's largest developer by sales in 2017 — a span of 21 years. The 2009 Hong Kong IPO was the financial peak, raising several billion dollars and giving Evergrande the credibility to expand faster.

By contracted sales, Evergrande exceeded 700 billion RMB in annual sales at its peak. No developer in Chinese history had grown a residential business that large from zero.

In personal terms, being named China's richest person by Forbes in 2021 — at $42 billion — represented the apex of a journey from a Henan village without running water. It was an extraordinary achievement measured against where he started.

The decision to keep expanding after 2015, when property cycle warning signs were clearly visible. More specifically: diversifying into electric vehicles, bottled water, soccer clubs, and theme parks using debt from the same fragile balance sheet as the property business.

None of these businesses was profitable at scale. All of them consumed cash that Evergrande could not afford to burn.

The EV venture — China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle — is the most vivid example. Hui invested billions into building out an EV manufacturing operation, promised to deliver vehicles by 2021, and ultimately delivered fewer than 1,000 cars before the company collapsed.

It was a brand exercise that destroyed capital.

If Hui had stopped expanding in 2015, strengthened the balance sheet, and focused on delivering the apartments already sold, Evergrande would still be a very large property company. It would not be in liquidation.

Hui Ka Yan believed China's growth story was real, durable, and underpriced by cautious Western investors. He was right for longer than almost anyone expected.

He also believed that in China, political connections and scale created their own protection. Companies too big and too embedded in local government supply chains could not be allowed to fail catastrophically.

That calculation turned out to be wrong.

His approach was expansion over consolidation at every decision point. When other developers paused to strengthen their balance sheets, Hui bought more land.

When interest rates rose, he issued more offshore bonds. The philosophy was always: grow bigger than the risk.

It worked until it didn't.

Hui Ka Yan married Ding Yumei in the 1980s. They have two sons.

His family maintained substantial wealth through holding structures outside China, which became a subject of legal proceedings during the restructuring. His wife was involved in some of the offshore asset structuring that regulators scrutinized as Evergrande's crisis deepened.

Hui graduated from Wuhan University of Science and Technology in 1982 with a degree in metallurgical engineering. He was the first person in his village to attend a university.

He has cited that achievement — getting out of Taikang County through education — as the foundation of everything that followed. His metallurgy background gave him an engineering instinct for process and scale that served him in construction, even if finance was always the weakest link in his expertise.

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