Shandong Sunrise Group Co, a major private refinery in East China's Shandong Province that used to be China's largest soybean importer, recently went bankrupt due to insolvency.
Established on December 1, 1999, Shandong Sunrise couldn't pay off matured debts and has thus applied for bankruptcy and recombination, according to a filing published on the Information Website of National Bankrupt Enterprises' Recombination Cases on Friday. The filing, however, didn't specify why the company had accumulated heavy debts.
Shandong Sunrise couldn't be reached by the Global Times on Wednesday and the company's official website couldn't be accessed as of press time.
Shandong Sunrise's debt problem actually emerged several years ago. Domestic news site jiemian.com reported on Tuesday that the company, affected by trading financial risks in 2015, began seeing financing strains, and so the local government helped the company out by making commercial banks provide more credit to it.
The company's imports of soybeans once ranked No.3 in China, according to jiemian.com. And in 2012, it was the country's biggest importer of soybeans, with the amount at 5.51 million tons, representing 9.4 percent of the country's total imports of goods.
In addition to soybean imports, the company's trade business also covers chemical products such as crude and fuel oil. It also owns 20 kinds of equipment for chemical and refined production like asphalt. In 2016, the total output value of its chemical business was 16.85 billion yuan ($2.48 billion).
