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Mr. Shou. Thank you for your introduction. Good afternoon, our friends from the investment field. I would like to first of all thank you for coming to our result announcement. We can see many people of you are here, and we thank you for your interest in our Greentown Group. I will quickly go over the highlights of our interim results and leaving more time for the Q&A session.
Overall speaking, our result is flat for the first half of the year. After a volatility happening last year, our company is going through a transformation, and we are stabilizing this year. What you are seeing this year for the first half of 2013 is what happens in our transformation. Our sales, compared to last year, is a decrease of 18.9%. This is due to our sales of around over 10 projects.
In the first half of this year, on the contrary, you can see our JV business has actually grown quite a lot. In first half of 2013, our unit sale is quite high. It is around CNY 20,000/ sq m. To the best of my knowledge, our company, among the listed companies, our unit sale price is the highest among the peers. Even though there is almost 20% decrease in revenue, our profit has gone up. Our total profit has increased by 2.4%, but our net profit margin has increased to 24%. Our core profit, there is a 19.6% in our core profit growing. We are working with The Wharf Group. You can see our return on ROE is still doing quite well.
Our gross profit is around 30%. Sale from properties, compared to last year, gross profit percent is around 26%, so there is about a 3% growth. You can see our profit is doing well. For our financial position, our financial position is more stable compared to last year. Our net profit. The long-term borrowing, which is maturing in one year, is CNY 7.7 billion. This is included in our PowerPoint. In the later pages, you will find I am just talking through to you in advance. Among them, about CNY 5.6 billion that we will need to pay back. In the second half of this year, in the first half of this year, we have paid back around CNY 10 billion debt. For the second half, if we pay back the CNY 5.6 billion by the first half of next year, there will only be CNY 2 billion left to repay.
Our debt structure is also becoming more reasonable. You can see we have due within one year and due within one to two years. In the first half of this year, we have issued three types of bonds. The first date is on January 28th. This is around $400 million. Since 2007, we haven't issued any bonds. This is the first time we have issued. I believe that we have received quite a lot of confidence from the investors. That is why we are receiving an effective yield of 8.5%, which is basically equivalent to BB classification. Our bond issuance is at above par. In May 2013, we issued a dim sum bond, and originally the effective yield is around 5%. After swap, we achieved a saving of 1%, so the effective yield of the bond issued in May was 4.6%-5%.
Every time when we issued a bond in the first half of the year, it has always been very smooth. Recently, Standard & Poor's has upgraded our rating to BB-. After our annual report of 2013, I believe that it's possible that our rating might continue to rise. Currently, our offshore debt is post-balance sheet offshore financing. We bought a piece of land in Shanghai this year, which we obtained syndicated loan, and this is at the rate of LIBOR + 3.88%. Another financing of $100 million at LIBOR + 4%. Our financing channels are more diversified. By end of June, our offshore debt is around 31% of total debt. in the future, we hope that the percentage of offshore financing could continue to increase because we are able to obtain such debt at a cheaper rate. This is quite satisfying to the group at the moment.
For our presale in the first half of the year, we have sold 1.5 million sq m, up 29% from the same period last year. Our sales amounted to RMB 32.5 billion. This represents a 47.7% increase compared to the same time of last year. The presale figures of August will be released in the beginning of September, and we have maintained the same level as we have achieved in the first half of the year. We are confident that we will be able to achieve our target for this year. For our valuation of the company, we have used the criteria of the capital coming in, and I believe that has been doing very well in terms of land bank. I think we maintained calm. Some investors are worried that we might be not prudent in spending our money.
However, you can see here, our highlight is that we have acquired a piece of land of RMB 8.2 billion, acquired it from a Hong Kong company in Shanghai. In addition, in Hangzhou, we have also acquired Jindu Golf Villa together with Sunac. The acquisition cost is quite reasonable, giving us a very good cash flow situation. In the future, we will continue to look for similar projects. In the second half of this year, we think that there might be some more acquisition projects. We are going to continue to do our research in the acquisition of projects. This is the situation of the first half of the year. Last year and the year before last year, we have both been awarded the company that has been the most satisfying company among consumers. Our peers were very jealous of us.
Again this year, there was another survey conducted for customer satisfaction within 16 cities. In Suzhou and Hangzhou, in those cities, we only have villa projects. Going forward for our company, we are undergoing a transformation at the moment. Last year, we are talking about a transformation from the traditional sales center to the active agency model. For this year, in the past, we have always focused on the hardware of our projects, which you have seen. In the past few years, we have also been working on improving the service. In the future, besides continuing to maintain a leading position in our hardware part, we will continue to improve our services. We are going to combine the resources we have using IT online cloud computing service platform to organize all the information together for our customers and our residents.
We are very close to them, and we would like to provide them with the best service that we could. Our positioning is that we are going to be a service provider for our residents, focusing on the safety, practicality, durability, comfort, et cetera. This will be a continued service after customers have purchased properties from us. The second transformation is on our product strategy. Our strategy is that we are a company led by our projects. We believe that in the past, what we have believed is that what we understand is what the customer wants, and we have used our understanding to the customer's understanding. However, from the current situation, now it seems like this doesn't apply anymore. We need to consider more about the customer's needs. We are going to develop properties that meet the requirements of the customers.
We are going to further continue to detail and to provide more detailed different segments of properties. It does not mean that we will only develop high-end properties. We are going to work in social housing as well. What differs us from the other peer is that all of our products are high-end quality, and we will be able to provide our customers with the best quality for the best prices. In the past, our products may have not met the requirements of the customers. For example, they are very good, but they're too big, too nice, and too expensive to really become affordable for our customers. Now we are developing more small-sized or medium-sized flats or apartments. This is thanks to our research in customers' needs survey to help us understand what is wanted more in the market.
Additionally, on our project's expansion in the past, we have always been an opportunist. However, this is not a good strategy. We need to find projects that suit Greentown. We haven't done enough in the past. There is further room for us to restructure our projects. Luckily, the lands that we have purchased in the past was quite cheap. In 2000, we bought about 35 mu of land in Hainan at the cost of RMB 2,000. That is very lucky that in the past we have paid very little for the land, and in the future, we will also pay attention to the expansion of projects. In addition, we are going to further enhance our asset-light strategy. I often speak of our profits. Last year, we have maintained a healthy growth, which is around RMB 480 million, and this year will probably be around the same.
With the net profit that we have gained in the past three years, we would only be able to acquire two further pieces of lands, not in the premium location, prime location. In the past, what we have done is that we have borrowed money to purchase land, which has led to a high debt ratio. You can see our sale price per unit is the highest. Our debt asset ratio was also the highest in the past. Right now in the Chinese market, nothing is clear. We have experienced volatility last year, end of last year. Of course, we have come through the storm from the other end, but it was a very good lesson for us.
Right now, it is no problem for us to receive loans or to apply for loans, but we have made a target for our company that our debt asset ratio is not going to exceed 70%. What this means that we will be limited in terms of land purchasing. We want to ensure that the capital return. There is a lot of idle funds in society, various of investments going on. We would like to use these funds in a reasonable way. This is also a very important development area for our company. In another area, we are not going to bid for too expensive lands. We have made the target of obtaining reasonable cost of land. Right now, Chinese real estate market is going through a reshuffle due to various reasons. Some people might want to grant their land to somebody else.
We are going to make sure that when we undertake such land, we are going to get it at a low cost. Just now, I mentioned our debt asset ratio is not going to exceed 70%, where offshore financing currently is 31% of total debt, which in the future we anticipate that would go up to 50% of our total debt. This is a basic brief of our strategy for our finance. Internally, we believe that there is still further room to improve. In the past, we have expanded too fast. Now we have been slowing down our process and to look at our resources to think what we could do to better utilize such resources. In the past, you know that our bonus to our teams is around 10%. We have eliminated this rule.
Right now, our bonus system would be pegged with the total performance of the company. We also have a dedicated remuneration committee working on such areas. Overall speaking, we can say that last year our company has gone through a major illness, and right now we are in the recovering period. We think that we are recovering very well, and after one to two years of restructuring, I believe that we will become, again, a very good company, a very healthy company in the market. Thank you.