January's Bargain Hunt: This Chinese Asset Is Up For Sale At 30% Discount — Trap Or Treasure?

China, the world’s second-largest economy by gross domestic product (GDP), is grappling with a crisis in its domestic real estate sector and spillover effects have cast a shadow over the performance of its offshore stock market.

What Happened: BlackRock Inc. BLK is speeding up the sale of an office complex in Shanghai at a 30% discount to its purchase price due to the sluggish property market in the Chinese largest city.

The property, Bloomberg reported, consists of two towers at Waterfront Place. It was purchased in 2018 from PGIM Real Estate for approximately 1.2 billion yuan ($167 million). It is part of a real estate investment fund managed by BlackRock and offers 27,805 square meters (299,290 square feet) of office space.

New home prices in China experienced their sharpest decline in December, marking the largest drop since February 2015, as Reuters reported last week.

Additionally, property sales, measured by floor area, saw a significant 23% decrease in December compared to the same period in the previous year.

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Chinese Offshore Shares Widen Discount To Onshore Counterparts

Offshore-listed Chinese stocks are often considered a more accurate indicator of the health of China’s economy and broader investor sentiment. These stocks listed in both Hong Kong and New York have recently experienced a significant widening of their discount when compared to stocks listed domestically in Shanghai or Shenzhen, reflecting a widespread pessimism on Chinese equities available to global investors.

Redmond Wong, a market strategist at Saxo Capital Markets HK Ltd., told Bloomberg that a considerable number of investors in Hong Kong-listed stocks, known as H shares, are overseas institutional funds. Many of these funds have shifted their investments away from Hong Kong to other Asian markets, including Japan.

Over the past year, both the iShares MSCI Hong Kong Index Fund EWH and the iShares MSCI China ETF MCHI have seen declines by a third of their value. These two benchmarks for Chinese stocks are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2011.

The relative strength of the Hang Seng Index, a key indicator of Hong Kong-listed stocks, compared to the Chinese domestic CSI 300 index — which tracks the performance of the top 300 stocks traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges — has now reached levels not seen since April 2009.

When compared to the 5-year average level, offshore Chinese stocks currently trade at a 36% discount compared to their domestic onshore counterparts, highlighting a significant performance gap between these two market segments.

This contrast is also prominently observed when examining individual stocks.

The two largest constituents of the CSI 300 index are Kweichow Moutai Ltd (600519) and Ping An Insurance (Group) Of China (601318). The two firms experienced smaller declines over the year: Kweichow Moutai down 13% and Ping An Insurance was down 23%.

In contrast, the two largest offshore stocks, Tencent Holding Ltd TCEHY and Alibaba Group Holdings Inc. BABA, have seen more substantial declines of 33.6% and 43.2%, respectively.

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