For two years, a financial crisis has rocked developers China Evergrande Group, Country Garden Holdings and
The implications of this don’t just matter for buyers of property-developer bonds. China’s construction sector accounts for nearly 7 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. Its hunger for metal is so voracious that plans for mining the materials needed for the energy transition stand or fall on whether the current real estate crash will allow millions of tonnes of copper, aluminium and nickel to be diverted from apartment fittings toward solar panels, electric cars and wind farms.
Home sales and starts trace a boom-and-bust pattern that’s far more dramatic than we see in cement output, which has declined modestly since peaking in 2014 and resembles the steady pace of home completions. Production of steel, copper, aluminium and glass, buoyed by manufacturing demand, has increased, even as the real estate market crashed.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)