Greenland Group Leads China’s Fortune 500 Real Estate Developers

China’s property market has been on the upswing in the last year, and the rise in real estate prices has helped four of the country’s top developers land in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s biggest companies, with China Vanke, Dalian Wanda and Evergrande Real Estate joining the rankings of the world’s largest companies for the first time.

Shanghai-based Greenland Group came in tops among Chinese developers with $33 billion in revenues putting it at 311^th on Fortune’s list, which ranked companies based on their revenues for the 2015 fiscal year. The giant state-owned developer actually saw its global rank slide from 2014, when it had stood 258^th worldwide.

Vanke, Wanda and Evergrande Join Fortune 500

China Vanke, which has been locked in a hostile takeover battle for several months, looks even more like a prize worth fighting for after the developer landed on the Fortune 500 list for the first time. Ranked at 356^th, the developer founded by entrepreneur Wang Shi generated $29.3 billion in revenue last year to come next among Chinese real estate companies after Greenland.

Despite diversifying into theme parks, movie production and online finance, Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group fell just short of matching Vanke’s top-line income, with $27.3 billion in revenues for 2015. The company, which despite buying out AMC Theatres, Legendary Entertainment and several sports marketing companies still makes most of its money from its fleet of shopping malls, ranked 385^th on the list.

Although it’s well-known for being China’s most highly leveraged developer, Evergrande Real Estate scored well with Chinese home buyers in 2015, bringing in revenues of $21.2 billion last year after its sales shot up by more than 53 percent since the previous year. The strong performance was enough to boost Evergrande, which is controlled by flamboyant billionaire Xu Jiayin, to 496^th – just squeaking into the Global 500.

Three Chinese Firms Land in Top Five

Helped by China’s continuing economic growth and the country’s increasingly wealthy population, three Chinese firms landed in the top five globally, ranking behind America’s Wal-Mart, which came in atop the list again this year with $482 billion in revenues.

Behind the US retail giant at number two was China’s electrical power utility, the State Grid with $329 billion in revenue, China National Petroleum was third with $299 billion in revenue and Sinopec, another Chinese oil company was fourth with $294 billion in revenue. Royal Dutch Shell, also in the oil business, was fifth on the list with $272 billion in revenues for 2015.

In addition to the Chinese pure-play property developers in the top 500, China Poly Group, whose real estate subsidiary ranks among the mainland’s top ten real builders, came in 457^th on the list, and conglomerate China Resources, which owns 15 percent of Vanke and boasts its own property subsidiary, was 91^st on the list.