Zhou Anmi

Zhou Anmi was formerly general manager of Poly Capital. According to an interview published in the January 2022 issue of China Real Estate Finance, Zhou Anmi said that in the nearly seven years since its founding, Poly Capital had consistently treated equity investment in real estate projects as its cornerstone business, adhering to prudent investment and strategic focus: seizing investment opportunities at market lows, avoiding blindly chasing prices at market highs, and holding firm to its profit standards. The company focused on deepening its presence in city clusters, concentrating on core locations in core first- and second-tier cities, with its invested projects spread across key node cities of major economic regions such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and Chengdu-Chongqing, and diversified risk through a portfolio of projects in different regions. In investment management, the company had a review and risk-control mechanism, set high requirements for the precision and professionalism of pre-investment project research, and after investing took part as a shareholder in decisions on major project matters, achieving oversight of the entire development process.

Discussing the industry situation, Zhou Anmi said in the interview that in the short term the property market was undergoing volatile adjustment, with pressure on developers persisting and divergence intensifying, while steadily run developers showed a clearer competitive advantage; bailouts were a good approach, effectively solving funding problems for distressed developers and helping their debt crises achieve a soft landing, and helping distressed projects resume construction early and deliver on schedule. Zhou Anmi said Poly Capital would respond to the policy direction of regulators and explore setting up a bailout fund for real estate development. In the long term, Zhou Anmi believed the property market’s scale of more than 10 trillion yuan remained, the industry was in a phase of adjustment downward from its peak, demand for home purchases and upgrades driven by the population base and urbanisation still existed, and the conversion of existing stock was also a new track.

On the direction of transformation, Zhou Anmi believed that transformation varies from company to company, and that companies need to keep cultivating familiar industries, make good products and explore new development models. Zhou Anmi noted that the urbanisation rate had reached 65%, that Shanghai and Shenzhen each had a floating population of more than 10 million, and that cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu each had a floating population of more than 8 million; the real estate sector’s existing stock was worth 300 trillion yuan, and assuming an annual urban renewal rate of 2%, annual sales would still amount to 8 trillion yuan, with forecasts that annual sales would remain at 10 trillion to 14 trillion yuan in future. Zhou Anmi also noted that the value added of the real estate industry in 2021 was 7.8 trillion yuan, while the value added of the industry’s upstream and downstream sectors was nearly 20 trillion yuan; developers could extend into formats such as apartments, hotels, shopping centres, office buildings and convention and exhibition centres, as well as industry chain segments such as private equity funds, project management construction, property management, brokerage, cultural tourism and elderly care, shifting from a “property development mindset” to an “operating mindset.”

On the way forward for developers, Zhou Anmi said that project management construction (daijian) and REITs were both opportunities for diversified development, but not the only directions. Zhou Anmi said that since 2021, against the background of the “three red lines” and weakening market expectations, the project management construction industry, characterised by “asset-light, low leverage and high profit margins,” had seen new opportunities, with some institutions forecasting that the industry could reach a scale of hundreds of billions of yuan in the next few years; project management construction mainly took the forms of government, commercial, capital and co-financing models, and relied heavily on developers’ brand influence and operational capability. As for REITs, Zhou Anmi believed that overseas experience showed they were the general trend, able to effectively revitalise existing assets, create a virtuous investment cycle, raise the proportion of equity funding and reduce corporate leverage; at the time the domestic public REITs market was still at an early stage, focused mainly on infrastructure, with residential, commercial and office assets not yet included in the pilot scope, while three affordable rental housing REITs had been listed one after another, and affordable rental housing could achieve exits through REITs.

On industry chain investment, Zhou Anmi said that Poly Capital adopted a “two-wheel drive” approach, focusing on technology with one hand and industry with the other, and had invested in whole-home smart home company “UIOT Super Smart Home,” artificial intelligence company “SenseTime,” “Dajie Robotics,” which focuses on building BIM data and industrial robots, and customised home furnishing brand “Piano,” with its investments never departing from the main axis of its core property business. Poly Capital joined with Country Garden Venture Capital (Shenzhen Country Garden Innovation Investment Co., Ltd.) to jointly establish the “Poly-Country Garden Industry Chain Fund,” with the latter acting as a co-GP alongside Poly Capital to jointly launch a dual-GP industry chain empowerment fund. Zhou Anmi said that Country Garden Holdings Company Limited was chosen as a partner, first, because the two sides shared the same thinking and reached consensus, and second, because Poly and Country Garden Holdings had complementary strengths; they hoped to achieve results by relying on both sides’ shareholder backgrounds, similar investment strategies and consistent investment directions, and by drawing on Country Garden Holdings’s business empowerment capabilities on the development side and its scenario implementation capabilities on the property services side, to empower each other and jointly expand the industry chain ecosystem.