Top Collector Adrian Cheng May Lose CEO Role from His Family’s Firm, New World Development, After Record Losses

Top art collector Adrian Cheng is at risk of losing his position as CEO at his family’s Hong Kong property development firm, New World Development Co., after the company posted its first annual loss in 20 years.

Cheng, a regular face on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, may be replaced by New World’s current Chief Operating Officer, Ma Siu-Cheung, according to a report by Bloomberg.

New World in August predicted that a sluggish real estate market and the resulting writedowns, an accounting technique in which an asset’s value is reduced on paper to reflect its true fair market value and to offset a loss of expense, would cost the company between $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion in losses at the end of the fiscal year.

Cheng joined the family business in 2007 as an executive director and, in 2020, was named chief executive. In 2019, Cheng founded the K11 group, an art-meets-commerce-and-development initiative. K11 was responsible for initiatives like the K11 Craft and Guild Foundation, which focuses on the preservation of traditional Chinese craftsmanship, and the K11 Art Foundation, which promoted the development of emerging Chinese artists and has staged more than 60 exhibitions across China.

Earlier this month, a state-owned Chinese company CR Longdation, a subsidiary of China Resources Holdings Co., placed a bid on New World’s K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district. Offloading the K11 Art Mall would be one of multiple attempts to improve New World’s overall financial health in the face of a troublesome amount of debt—which, according to Bloomberg, is the highest among property development firms in China.