Genworth's Suitor Raises $1 Billion With San Francisco Project Sale

Genworth's new home page (Image: Genworth)

An arm of China Oceanwide Holdings Group Co. Ltd. — the company that's been trying for years to acquire Genworth Financial Inc. — has agreed to sell a big development project in San Francisco to an asset manager in China for the equivalent of about $1.1 billion.

The deal includes the Oceanwide Center LLC property and a nearby property, 88 First Street SF LLC.

Resources

A Chinese-language of China Oceanwide's Oceanwide Center sale filing is available here.
An article about the status of Genworth's engagement with China Oceanwide is available here.

China Oceanwide acquired Oceanwide Center in 2015 and 88 First Street in 2017, for a total of about $330 million. It broke ground on Oceanwide Center construction in 2016.

" There is a large difference between the transaction price and the asset evaluation value," China Oceanwide says in a discussion of the deal price, according to a Google Translate translation of the filing. "The main reason is that in this asset evaluation, the evaluation results included the capitalized financing cost of the project, and local investors believe that this part of the cost was not directly invested in the project."

Other factors affecting deal price include labor shortages, the effects of trade tariffs on major U.S. cities, and engineering construction costs, China Oceanwide says.

"Through this asset sale, the company can stop further capital investment in the underlying assets and recover large amounts of cash for main business development, return of borrowings or supplementary liquidity, etc., effectively alleviating the company's liquidity pressure," China Oceanwide says.

China Oceanwide is a Beijing-based real estate developer and financial services company that made many deals outside China in 2014 and 2015, a few years before China began putting new restriction on its financial services companies.

Genworth is a Richmond, Virginia-based company that was a major player in the U.S. life and annuity markets and a dominant player in the U.S. long-term care insurance market. It continues to be major seller of mortgage insurance in the United States and Australia.

—Read Genworth Suitor Puts Cash in Real Estate Subsidiary, on ThinkAdvisor.

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