HONG KONG (Reuters) – Country Garden, China’s biggest property developer by sales, said on Thursday it targets 10% sales growth in the next three years, and it expects its robotic business to start recording profits next year.
The attributable contracted sales growth target compares to a 3.3% growth posted in 2020 to 570.66 billion yuan ($87.32 billion).
“We will keep our top leading position,” company president Bin Mo told at an earnings conference.
The developer reported a core profit of 32.4 billion yuan in 2020, 19.3% lower than a year ago, hurt by delay of project delivery due to COVID-19.
Its shares slid after the earnings announcement, closing down 4.4%.
Mo said Country Garden’s two new business, construction robots and “modern agriculture” that uses unmanned vehicle technology, will be the growth drivers in the future.
The company has invested so far over 12 billion yuan on robotics, he added, with 90% spent on construction robots for building residential projects. It has 46 types of construction robots in the pipeline, with 18 already deployed for commercial use.
($1 = 6.5355 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Reporting by Clare Jim; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore