Wang Jianlin's cliff fight, Wang Sicong's coming-of-age ceremony

There is less than a month left to save yourself.

Written by | Liu Xingzhi

Edit | Zhao Jinjie

There are three real estate companies that Hollywood stars must know about – Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Wanda.

With Wang Jianlin's investment commitment of 50 billion yuan, Wanda has built China's largest film and television base in Qingdao step by step. Looking from the distance of Qingdao's landmark Coral Shell Bridge, on Chaoyang Mountain, the four big characters of the steel frame structure of "Oriental Shadow Capital" stand in a staggered manner, echoing with the "Hollywood" on the top of the hill north of Los Angeles on the other side of the world.

It's not a look. In September 2013, the Oriental Film Metropolis held a launching ceremony, and the red carpet was star-studded, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicole Kidman, Zhang Ziyi, Tony Leung, etc. In the lights of Qingdao, Hollywood celebrities in dresses are surrounded by Chinese security guards in camouflage uniforms, smiling like flowers in the face of flashing lights.

Source: Weibo

Matt Damon is the first international superstar to come to Qingdao to film, in 2015, he came to Qingdao with the crew of "The Great Wall" and stayed in Qingdao Hanbi Building. Han Bilou was once Chiang Kai-shek's favorite hotel in Taiwan, and opened its first store in mainland China in Qingdao in 2014.

A year later, "Pacific Rim 2" started filming, and the filmmakers originally wanted to go to Australia to shoot, but Wang Jianlin pulled them to Qingdao - of course, his own movie had to be filmed in his own film and television city, not to mention that Huanghai Bay was not far from the Pacific Ocean.

It's a pity that these two co-productions and star-studded masterpieces are not well received, and by the time the domestic masterpieces "The Wandering Earth 2" and "Fengshen", which were also filmed in Qingdao, were released, Oriental Film was no longer surnamed Wang.

In 2017, Wang Jianlin encountered some "small troubles" and sold some assets to Sun Hongbin of Sunac, including Oriental Film Metropolis. Fortunately, at that time, Wanda still had thousands of theaters and tens of thousands of screens around the world, and it still had a lot of say in the film industry.

Now, the entire Wanda movie is no longer surnamed Wang.

Just this week, Shanghai Ruyi plans to take over 51% of Wanda Investment's shares and become the actual controller of Wanda Film, Wanda Film may soon have the surname Ke, and eventually it is likely that Tencent, surnamed Ma Huateng, is the controlling shareholder of Ruyi.

The details of this transaction have not yet been disclosed, but referring to the current market value of Wanda Film, Wang Jianlin will get about 10 billion yuan in exchange for about 10 billion yuan after selling the shares of Wanda Film several times, although it is far from enough to plug the hole of the current 30 billion yuan gambling, but this is already one of the few life-saving money that Wanda can get at the moment.

When the economy was still warm, Wang Jianlin was the east, Sunac Sun Hongbin, Suning Zhang Jindong, Country Garden Yang Guoqiang and others went to the meeting and invested heavily in Wanda.

Wang Jianlin is in a better position than some other real estate developers in China, and he still has a fortune of more than $6 billion. Forbes commented. Now in the cold winter, these people are looking forward to Wang Jianlin helping them "return blood".

If European and American companies have defined cinema, Wanda has redefined cinema to some extent.

In 2012, Wanda acquired the loss-making AMC Cinema, and Wang Jianlin spent $600 million to replace ordinary seats with leather sofa recliners, and some theaters also had a la carte service.

Stimulated by the novel experience, it only took one year for the American audience to bring AMC back to life and land on the New York Stock Exchange. Wanda took advantage of the victory to pursue the acquisition of Australian, British, and Nordic cinema companies one after another, about $3 billion, and AMC and Wanda behind it became the world's No. 1 cinema chain.

In the United Kingdom, Wang Jianlin invested tens of millions of pounds to renovate a "Queen's Cinema", and Queen Elizabeth also sat on a leather sofa, no longer having to endure the old facilities of her age.

With 12,000 screens in hand, Wang Jianlin has become one of the most powerful Chinese in Hollywood. In October 2016, Wanda held a "Sino-US Film Summit Forum" at the American Art Museum, and all the chairmen of the six major Hollywood studios were present. This is Wanda's home stadium and Wang Jianlin's stage, in the sea of media flashes such as "The Wall Street Journal" and "The New York Times", Wang Jianlin is full of momentum, and said word by word: "The future of world cinema is in China, and Hollywood needs to make changes." ”

Wang Jianlin

The discordant sound soon appeared, which also confirmed Wanda's strength. At the Motion Picture Association of America meeting, some of the bosses of Hollywood's six major studios began calling Wanda "Monster."

A red billboard appeared on Sunset Avenue that read "China owns AMC," and some lawmakers began to worry that Hollywood would be influenced by Wanda.

It's not just Hollywood and Capitol Hill that are worried about Wanda, and it's not just movies that Wanda covets.

In September 2014, Wanda announced that it would spend $900 million to build a 350-meter-high, 89-story five-star hotel in Chicago's CBD, which is Wanda's third five-star hotel overseas. The New York Times commented: "The skyscraper he [Wang Jianlin] is building will repaint the skylines of London and Chicago." ”

As Wanda's internationalization accelerates, foreigners get to know Wanda, and foreign executives have the opportunity to get a closer look at the inner workings of a Chinese giant.

The annual meeting is one of the important observation windows. In the past, Wanda's annual meeting was once known as the "Spring Festival Gala of the Real Estate Circle", and the finale was Wang Jianlin's party solo.

In the 2016 Wanda "Spring Festival Gala", Wang Jianlin sang Cui Jian's "Nothing", and the video was uploaded to the Internet, with more than 1 billion views.

Rock knows no borders, and foreign executives hum and applaud along, completely unaware that the lyrics they don't understand are the proverbs of their fate:

The original dream is also gone

Whether I really have nothing

Wang Jianlin's dream in planning suffered a setback in 2017. At that time, the China Banking Regulatory Commission pushed Wanda to the bottom with a risk investigation letter. According to China Economic Weekly, "irrational, abnormal, ill-motivated overseas investment behaviors in real estate, hotels, cinemas, entertainment industries, sports clubs and other fields have become the focus of supervision." ”

Wang Jianlin began to sell overseas assets, and Chicago Tower, La Liga giants Atletico Madrid, AMC, etc., were put on the shelves.

At the 2018 annual meeting, Wang Jianlin's solo was gone, and Wanda executives sang "Singing the Motherland", Wang Jianlin said in his speech, "Wanda's domestic assets accounted for 93%. At the 2019 annual meeting, the finale was the "Song of Wanda" written by Wanda executives singing lyrics by Lao Wang, and the lyrics read: "Seek innovation, always make breakthroughs, keep promises, and always be honest..."

In his speech at the 2018 annual meeting, Wang Jianlin's words were meaningful: "Many companies have done a good job for a while, but an adjustment may be gone." ”

Wang Jianlin is adjusting his cognition, and Wanda is also adjusting its trajectory and retreating back to the familiar field of commercial real estate. The 2019 Wanda Annual Conference was held in the Oriental Film Metropolis, but it has long been a matter of people there, and Wanda Mao has also changed its name to Sunac Mao.

Overseas acquisitions have hit a wall, but Wanda's influence of "surviving with broken arms" is still there, and Wang Jianlin's status in the rivers and lakes is still there, and he is still the guest of honor of industry bigwigs.

At the end of 2017, Suning's "Smart Retail Development Strategy" press conference, most of the real estate circle came to cheer, and Zhang Jindong pulled Wang Jianlin and stood in the C position together.

In April 2018, Yang Guoqiang of Country Garden also took over the olive branch of Zhang Jindong, and the two parties agreed that 600 Suning stores will settle in Country Garden within the year.

In the same year, Country Garden and Wanda signed a cooperation agreement to jointly build Sanlonghui Wanda Plaza in Yang Guoqiang's hometown of Shunde.

The frustrated old Wang has not given up, even if he sells overseas assets, Wanda is still a "Monster", Wang Jianlin wants to regroup and break a new world in the field of business management.

Country Garden's sales in 2018 exceeded 500 billion yuan, Suning's revenue in 2018 was nearly 250 billion yuan, and Wanda also began to pick up in 2018, with revenue exceeding 250 billion yuan.

The outside world thinks that the three companies come together as a match made in heaven: the owners who live in the five-star homes of Country Garden will take a stroll around Wanda Plaza after work and sweep goods in Suning's small store, which is a vivid portrait of the middle class in the wave of urbanization.

In the process of Wang Jianlin's regrouping, the three companies ushered in the opportunity of "pro-pro-pro".

In the second half of 2015, Hong Kong stocks entered a bear market, and Wanda Commercial "broke the net" in Hong Kong stocks. Wang Shi and Yu Liang can accept Vanke's breaking, but Wang Jianlin can't bear it. Unconvinced, Wang Jianlin chose to delist at the end of 2016 and switched to A-shares, and then re-targeted H-shares.

hit the listing twice, and Wang Jianlin, who has a wide circle of friends, signed a gambling agreement twice.

Before the expiration of the first VAM agreement, he personally called Tencent Ma Huateng, Suning Zhang Jindong, Sunac Sun Hongbin, and Jingdong Liu Qiangdong and brought in 34 billion yuan for share repurchase. Half a year before the transaction, Zhang Jindong and Xu Jiayin drank a glass of wine worth 20 billion yuan, and within half a year, Nanjing's Suning became a shareholder of two real estate giants in the north and south.

In 2021, Yang Guoqiang seized the opportunity of Zhuhai Wanda Commercial Management to lead the war before its listing, and sent two core enterprises, Country Garden Holdings and Country Garden Services, to invest in Wanda.

However, Wanda Commercial Management's listing plan failed to proceed as scheduled, and Yang Guoqiang's hopes of getting a piece of the pie are becoming increasingly slim. There are reports that Wanda is in talks with investors to delay the listing time.

Last month, at Wanda's "plea", investors in U.S. dollar bonds agreed to a one-year extension of the bonds. This dollar bond has a face value of 600 million, which is comparable to the price of installing a large sofa for AMC ten years ago, regardless of inflation and other factors.

Wanda gave a reason that creditors could not refuse: if it could not extend its dollar debt and defaulted significantly, Wanda would have no chance to continue borrowing from domestic banks.

During the thunderstorm in Country Garden, Qin Shuo, a well-known media person, said, "Country Garden has made great contributions to the urbanization of fourth- and fifth-tier cities and the improvement of residents' living conditions." ”

Recently, Feng Lun, chairman of Wantong, said in a video that Wanda's current difficulties "do not come from the market, but may come from its business model and the policies of regulatory authorities." The policy direction has changed as early as 2018, when Yu Liang judged that the turning point of the "Silver Age" had arrived.

Yang Guoqiang's hometown in Shunde, the chairman of Hong Kong's Hang Lung, once sighed: "Where have mainland developers seen cycles."

The dividends enjoyed by real estate in the past depend to a certain extent on the general environment and policies. The current decline of the industry confirms the arrival of a new round of real estate cycle.

If Wang Jianlin and Yang Guoqiang have not seen the cycle before, then Wang Sicong and other second generations do not know what the cycle is.

At the end of last month, Wang Sicong, who had been silent for a long time, appeared in casual clothes at a signing meeting of a cultural tourism project of the Tai'an Municipal Government of Shandong Province, triggering the reverie of the outside world about his "successor Wanda". Wanda responded that Wang Sicong was "busy with his own business" and did not participate in Wanda's business.

Wang Sicong left the entertainment industry for half his life, and returned to do cultural tourism. Although Wanda denied the rumors of "succession", at the time of the expiration of Wanda's 30 billion yuan VAM agreement, Wang Sicong's appearance meant that the former "Secretary of the Discipline Inspection Commission of the Entertainment Industry" chose to stand with his father when Wanda was dying.

Before this, Wang Sicong had never been so low-key. Some netizens commented on the launching ceremony of the Oriental Film Metropolis, "Chinese-style security uniforms, which brought the atmosphere of the stars on the scene to the level of the urban-rural junction", Wang Sicong replied "We are called Oriental Trench Hollywood", he was 25 years old at the time, and the Weibo profile was "young and frivolous, and his mouth is open". Sometimes when emotions come up, Wanda's business partner Tencent, and even his own Wanda Hotel, he has to complain. But with the closure of Weibo and the decline of the real estate industry, Wang Sicong has rarely appeared in public.

Wang Sicong

Wang Sicong has never been so "obedient". Previously, his business was concentrated in e-sports, live broadcast and other entertainment fields, and Lao Wang did not force Xiao Wang to take over, and Xiao Wang had no interest in managing Wanda.

Zhang Jindong is more generous to his son Zhang Kangyang than Wang Jianlin is to Wang Sicong. Lao Wang once gave Xiao Wang 500 million for trial and error, and Lao Zhang gave Xiao Zhang 2 billion as soon as he made a shot.

In the summer of 2016, Zhang Jindong spent about 2 billion yuan to acquire about 70% of the shares of the Serie A giants Inter Milan in the trough, and handed over this "big toy" to 25-year-old Zhang Kangyang to take care of. Since then, in Inter games, Chinese viewers can often see the club president, who is younger than many players on the field, "supervising the game" on the sidelines.

Since then, Milanese have only recognized two "Nerazzurri", one is called Inter Milan and the other is Jiangsu Suning.

In 2018, Inter Milan returned to the Champions League after six years, and Zhang Kangyang won Suning's "Chairman's Special Award" in January of the following year. Zhang Kangyang held the trophy and said excitedly: "If you go to Europe, if you go to Italy, when you mention the word Suning, the eyes of the people are full of awe. After speaking, Zhang Jindong took the lead, and the audience applauded thunderously.

Wang Sicong and Zhang Kangyang were reluctant to step into the river that their fathers had waded through, and Yang Huiyan had long been regarded by Yang Guoqiang as the best candidate to succeed.

In 2005, Yang Huiyan joined Country Garden as a purchasing manager, and before Country Garden went public in 2007, Yang Guoqiang transferred his equity to Yang Huiyan, and made it clear that the transfer of equity was to "train her to become the heir of Country Garden". With Country Garden's landing on the Hong Kong stock market, Yang Huiyan, who is only 26 years old, won the crown of "China's richest woman".

But as the real estate industry turned downward, these former richest men and the richest successors stood on the edge of the cliff one by one.

After investing in Evergrande, Zhang Jindong had to pay for his mistakes, and Zhang Kangyang's fate also ushered in a reversal - he was sued for defaulting on the loan of China Construction Bank, and the loan amount happened to be 2 billion; As for Wang Sicong, when Wang Jianlin was running to delay the negotiation of the listing VAM, he also stood on his father's side.

The three families standing on the edge of the cliff are all looking forward to the good news.

Since the beginning of this year, Zhang Jindong has met with the senior management of household appliance brands many times, and has also made frequent public appearances in various activities in Suning, which has the intention of making a comeback.

Recently, a number of state-owned banks have intensively offered real estate companies to hold symposiums, saying that they will better support the reasonable financing needs of real estate enterprises. Country Garden was also invited by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and is currently the only participating real estate company to participate in the "insurance".

On July 19, the "Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Promoting the Development and Growth of the Private Economy" was released, Wang Jianlin felt very excited, and studied it overnight. "I believe that with the guidance of the "Opinions", the private economy will usher in a new spring. ”

But until now, there are still more than 20 days before the gambling limit, and Wanda's fate has not yet been decided.

In the most extreme moments, the greatest qualities of a person are revealed. Wang Jianlin's biggest trait is decisiveness, he can finalize an investment in a few minutes, and he can also sell more than 60 billion assets in three weeks.

Now, Wang Jianlin is once again standing on the edge of the cliff, Wanda Movie is not the first, and most of them are not the last good assets to take off the word "king".

It is rumored that Wanda Plaza in first-tier cities has been put on the shelves by Wanda.

Resources:

"Qingdao Oriental Film Metropolis Delivery Sample: Sunac Wanda's Gains and Losses" prism

"Country Garden" Grabbing Funds" Wanda Commercial Management IPO" Leju Finance

"A glass of wine worth 20 billion yuan, revealing the business logic of Zhang Jindong's shareholding in Evergrande" China.com

""Selling" Alibaba, "Joining" Tencent, JD.com, Suning Station?", China Entrepreneur Magazine

"Innovation: 40 Years of Gao Qunyao Dancing with the Giants of the Times" Xu Tan