Evergrande receives 5.7b yuan in orders for bottled water

Real estate developer Evergrande Group received orders worth 5.7 billion yuan ($940 million) for its newly launched bottled water Evergrande Spring at an order-placement event in South China on Sunday.

Xu Jiayin, chairman of Evergrande Group, reportedly announced that the company plans to sell 10 billion yuan of bottled water in 2014 at a meeting in the city of Qingyuan, Guangdong Province.

He said Evergrande plans on sales climbing to more than 30 billion yuan in 2016, news portal sina.com.cn reported on Sunday.

The beverage was released by Evergrande on November 10, after the property developer gained fame sponsoring the Guangzhou soccer club that won the 2013 Asian Football Confederation Champions League title on November 9.

Xu said that the company had established a network of more than 200,000 distributors for the water within a month, "a miracle in the consumers good industry," according to the news portal. Distributors include Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco, Xu said.

"As the public's living standards increase, the demand for water, as a life necessity, will grow," Xu said. "Our goal is to achieve production capacity and sales of 150 million tons."

Xu said the company will focus on the beverage industry and residential property development in the future, sina.com.cn reported.