Yu Liang no longer makes friends

Business figures

2024-05-16 19:18Posted on the official account of Beijing Business People

Author: Guo Ruyi

来源：商业人物（ID：biz-leaders）

After some period of nervousness, Vanke finally heard some good news in the past two days.

One is that Vanke obtained a guaranteed loan of 7.3 billion yuan from a number of banks and successfully obtained a "blood transfusion". The other is that Vanke's stocks and bonds have risen sharply day after day, and they have finally taken a breath in the capital market.

Yu Liang, the chairman of the board of directors, should be able to relax a little.

As the vane of the industry, Vanke is almost stared at any wind and grass at present. As large as the adjustment of the entire company's strategy, as small as the operation of a subsidiary, it may be interpreted. No, the joint venture between Vanke and BYD that has just been cancelled is an example.

According to industrial and commercial data, a Shenzhen company called "Vanke Yundi" under Vanke was deregistered on May 10. The company was founded in 2017 by BYD and Vanke, with BYD holding 72% of the shares and Vanke holding 28% of the shares.

The background of the cooperation between the two parties is a blockbuster agreement reached at the end of 2016 - Vanke and BYD will jointly explore a new model of "rail + property". This was the first large-scale cooperation between the two companies, and Yu Liang and Wang Chuanfu, chairman of BYD, stood on the platform in a high-profile manner, depicting a grand vision to the outside world.

However, this cooperation ultimately failed, BYD's cloud rail business did not run out, and Vanke's new business attempts were impossible to talk about. There are reports that the joint venture began the deregistration process last year, and now the two parties have officially broken up.

In fact, when Vanke and BYD exchanged autumn waves, it was at a time when Vanke was carrying out strategic transformation and diversified business development. Since 2014, Vanke has decided to become an urban supporting service provider, rather than simply doing residential business. After the transformation, Vanke hopes to expand its business into residential real estate, consumer experience real estate and industrial real estate, which is considered to be a new growth curve.

Under this line of thinking, Vanke made a lot of friends in those years. Vanke has basically tried to cooperate with each other, cooperate with subsidiaries in various regions, or establish joint ventures. Not only BYD, Yu Liang also set his sights on a large number of well-known companies, hoping to cooperate to produce a chemical reaction and achieve a win-win situation. For example, he personally led a team to visit major Internet giants around 2014 to learn Internet thinking. Subsequently, Vanke cooperated with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu to establish a partnership system, build a networked community, and lay out a commercial community. In Yu Liang's view, in the Internet era, traditional real estate companies must understand the new rules and find new partners, otherwise it will be very dangerous.

In addition to Internet companies, Vanke has also made friends with physical giants, such as Wanda.

In 2015, Vanke and Wanda unexpectedly announced their cooperation. At that time, Wang Jianlin and Yu Liang both came to the signing site, complimented each other, and said that they would explore a new model of real estate enterprises, and the scale of this cooperation would be 100 billion yuan. Wanda's consideration is to further promote asset-light, while Vanke wants to improve its commercial real estate capabilities through cooperation, and the two parties will jointly acquire land for operation, test the waters of financial innovation and community consumption.

Yu Liang said back then: Wanda and Vanke are both in a critical stage of transformation, and the alliance meets the needs of both parties, which can be described as a good match, love at first sight. Wang Jianlin also echoed that the two companies are both well-known and decent, and Wanda will only find Vanke to cooperate.

However, after that high-profile press conference, the specific cooperation between the two companies has rarely been reported in the newspapers. It was not until June last year that the equity of Dalian Wanda Commercial Management was frozen, which led to sudden changes in the road to listing, and the outside world knew that it was the "old friend" Vanke who put Wanda together. Due to the financial disagreement between the two parties over the Changbai Mountain project, they almost tore their faces publicly, but fortunately, the dispute was finally settled. It used to be love at first sight, but I don't know if it still counts.

Until 2019, Vanke attacked everywhere, hoping to solve the development anxiety of the second half of real estate. In addition to opening joint ventures for project cooperation, it also initiates the establishment of funds to seek related investment opportunities. Vanke's business territory has also expanded to real estate, property services, commerce, long-term rental apartments, logistics and warehousing, education, pension and vacation, etc. Vanke's ambition is to build at least six 100-billion-level businesses in order to build a new Vanke.

It was also during this period that with the changes in the industry environment, Vanke shouted the famous slogan of "Survive". After several years of diversified transformation, Yu Liang had to propose convergence and focus to consolidate the fundamentals. By 2021, Vanke has proposed to pay equal attention to development business and operational business, but in fact, it still has a bit of diversification, but the attention may be slightly concentrated.

Since the beginning of this year, Vanke's liquidity has been tight, which has exacerbated the readjustment of its strategy. At the end of April, Vanke announced a high-profile slimming plan, Yu Liang said that Vanke will withdraw from its non-main business, clean up and transfer financial investment in non-main business, and focus on the three main businesses of integrated residential development, property management and rental housing. This means that those operational businesses that have achieved some success will be abandoned. The reason given by Yu Liang is very straightforward - part of the pressure on Vanke now comes from the fact that long-term operating businesses have taken up funds from the development business, and although most of them are doing well, the resources are really limited.

Vanke had to give up business, and Yu Liang had to give up his former partner.

Although neither side has publicly responded to the cancellation of the joint venture with BYD, it may be nothing more than the above logic. BYD also has a more exciting new energy vehicle battlefield, and Vanke also needs to concentrate on its main business, so as to gather and disperse. In addition, Vanke participated in the privatization of Asian logistics giant GLP in 2018, and according to Caixin, Vanke is now considering selling its stake for nearly 30 billion yuan. This is undoubtedly an emergency money, but the deal has not yet materialized.

As for more cooperation on non-main business projects, it should be affected by strategic adjustments, and Vanke's energy and resources are limited, and it is nothing more than a matter of timing and price to sell or exit.

As the latest move of the "slimming plan", Vanke recently sold a plot of land in Shenzhen at a significant discount, which was purchased in 2017 and originally planned to be used by employees in Shenzhen. However, due to "major changes in the industry situation", Vanke decided not to build the project again. Yu Liang swung the knife at his own people, and the friends he had made in the business in the past few years were probably even more willing to part with love.

In a pinch, let's fly separately.

*Header Picture | Visual China

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