CapitaLand Group sold part of its equity in 6 Raffles Asset Portfolios in China to Ping An Life Insurance of China.
--Summary
On June 28 news, CapitaLand Group sold part of its equity in six Raffles asset portfolios in China to Ping An Life Insurance of China.
This cooperation involves projects including Shanghai Raffles City, Beijing Raffles City, Ningbo Raffles City, Chengdu Raffles City, Changning Raffles City and Hangzhou Raffles City. The total asset value of the asset portfolio is 46.7 billion yuan.
In this cooperation, Ping An acquired part of the equity in the above-mentioned asset portfolio. After the transaction is completed, CapitaLand’s shareholding in each project will be changed from 30.7%-55% through private equity funds before the transaction to 12.6%-30 %, and continue to be responsible for project operations and asset management.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of this year and will recover more than S$2 billion (approximately RMB 9.6 billion) in capital for CapitaLand.
Pan Zixiang, CEO of CapitaLand Group (China) Investment and Portfolio Management, said that part of the funds recovered from the transaction will be used for key investment in new economic assets such as data centers. CapitaLand will continue to deepen the Chinese market. In the next few years, CapitaLand Group plans to expand the scale of its new economic assets in China from S$1.5 billion at the end of 2020 to S$5 billion. The focus of investment covers industrial parks, logistics and data centers, and its tenants are usually from the new economic sector, enjoying strong fundamentals and a favorable regulatory environment.
In April of this year, CapitaLand Group formally announced that it will increase investment in new economic assets and acquire a super-large-scale data center park in Shanghai for RMB 3.66 billion. This is CapitaLand’s first data center project in China. It is understood that the data center is composed of four buildings, with a total construction area of up to 75,000 square meters after completion, and an IT power supply capacity of up to 55 megawatts. The park is currently in operation, and the main customers it serves include the two largest telecommunications operating companies in China. Pan Zixiang said that entering the data center market in China has allowed CapitaLand Group to diversify its asset classes and at the same time develop its operational capabilities in multiple fields. This is also in line with the Group's strategy to increase investment in new economic assets in China.
CapitaLand Group Data Center CEO and Group Chief Strategy Officer He Jihong said that CapitaLand Group has established core competitiveness in the design, development and operation of data centers. As the group expands its data center investment portfolio globally, CapitaLand Group The group will seek to leverage its expertise in this field in the core market. At the same time, 5G, artificial intelligence and big data are driving the growth of the digital economy and creating strong demand for data centers. Data center, a continuously growing asset class, is a global investment opportunity and will also be one of the strategic focuses of CapitaLand Group.
CapitaLand currently owns 4 data centers in Singapore and 11 data centers in Europe. It is also the fund and asset manager of a data center development project in South Korea. At present, the total asset size of the data center investment portfolio of CapitaLand Group exceeds S$2.5 billion.
