Quote:
Originally Posted by headcase
I seem to remember doing that when the Spire broke ground, I think I'll skip any festivities this time around...
SSDD
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They're different situations and this thing has a lot better chance of happening than the Spire ever did. Garrett Kelleher was a developer that had some buildings and what not here and in Ireland, and then faced many years of financial stress for that project. He only employed about 100-200 total employees. Then the recession hit.
On the other hand, we have Dalian Wanda Group as the developer of this building who:
* Does $40B in revenue per year
* Employs over 110,000 people in its group
* Has a chairman and founder who's the richest man in China, ranked at #18 richest person in the world (who also owns 20% of Athletico Madrid)
* Largest real estate developer in all of China (that's kind of impressive, isn't it?) - they own 109 "plazas" across China (with over a quarter BILLION sq ft of leasable space), over 70 luxury hotels, about 100 department stores
* Owns AMC theaters and bought them a few years ago for over $2.5B.
* Just bought Legendary Entertainment in January for $3.5B, the same group who made such movies as The Dark Knight, 300, Straight Outta Compton, Batman Begins, The Hangover, etc.
* Owns the UK yacht maker Sunseeker and bought them not long ago for $500M
* Owns Australian cinema chain Hoyts
Yeah, I don't know. I think Wanda Group has more business sense in any one of their board members' pinkies than all of Shellbourne combined. Kelleher and his company are chumps compared to a company like Wanda. Wanda not only owns tons of real estate in China, but they own a fucking Hollywood entertainment company that's made some of the biggest movies of the past decade, as well as one of the largest movie theater chains in the world that's does billions a year in revenue by themselves and are listed on the NYSE, as well as yacht makers, etc. Wanda Cinemas is actually the largest cinema operator in the entire world.
This thing is a lot more of a reality than the Spire ever was. Wanda is diversified and rich enough to build this thing and finance a lot of it themselves if they wanted to. They have been pushing hard the last handful of years in the name of diversification and this is something, even though it's real estate, that would help them out in that too.
Oh, let's not forget this is also their first US project so I'm very sure they want it to succeed.