(Yicai Global) Jan. 10 -- China Evergrande Group has relocated its headquarters back to Guangzhou, the city where the embattled developer was founded a quarter century ago, after ending a lease on offices in Shenzhen, The Paper reported.

The sign with the homebuilder’s name written in Chinese characters has been removed from the Zhuoyue Houhai Center building in Shenzhen, the report said today.

Evergrande was set up in Guangzhou, the capital of southern Guangdong province, in 1996, developed into a Fortune 500 company, and was the world’s biggest property developer at its peak in 2017. But the company announced its first debt default last month after its liquidity crisis deepened in the middle of last year.

In September 2016, Evergrande announced that subsidiary Evergrande Real Estate planned to go public in Shenzhen via a backdoor listing with Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Real Estate and Properties Group. It then moved its headquarters to Shenzhen in mid-2017, but the listing plan fell through in November 2020.

In December 2017, Evergrande secured the rights to use a 10,377-square-meter plot of land at the Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base in Nanshan District for CNY5.6 billion (USD878.7 million), and later began construction work there on a 394-meter high Evergrande Super Headquarters.

The Evergrande Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base Project, once the firm’s top priority, was expected to wrap up in 2024 with a total investment of about CNY3.5 billion, per the original plan. The latest reports on the project are still from April 2020 when construction of the deepest engineering piles was finished.

Evergrande officially declared a debt default for the first time on Dec. 3, admitting in a filing to the Hong Kong bourse that it would not be able to repay USD260 million.

At present, the builder’s focus is on ensuring the smooth delivery of more than 700 real estate projects located across China to avoid unfinished buildings. Data it disclosed in a WeChat article showed 91.7 percent of its projects had resumed as of Dec. 26 last year.

Editor: Peter Thomas