Suntech Power Holdings Co., the Chinese solar company with its main unit in bankruptcy proceedings, said the subsidiary will meet with creditors earlier than anticipated as it reported a 48 percent drop in revenue last year, Bloomberg reported. Wuxi Suntech will meet its creditors in Wuxi on May 22 as a court in the Chinese city considers how to restructure its debts, the company said today in a statement. Suntech said it was delaying its full-year results after reporting $1.63 billion in preliminary revenue.

A credit boom in China failed to keep economic recovery on track in the first quarter, suggesting the cash sloshing around the economy is not yielding the desired effect of stoking growth and could instead exacerbate property and inflationary risks, Reuters reported in an analysis. A rapid rise in credit in recent months has been driven by the fast-growing shadow banking sector rather than formal bank lending, raising two major concerns.

Cash-strapped Chinese solar panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd is seeking to sell some assets and bring in a strategic investor to repay debt and revitalise the company, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. "It is looking for buyers for some of its projects and downstream assets," said the source, who asked not to be identified as he was not authorised to speak to the media. "It is also seeking to bring in a strategic investor to take a stake in the company." "Suntech is in dire need of cash," the source added.

China’s sovereign credit rating has been cut by a major international agency for the first time since 1999 with Fitch raising concerns on Tuesday that the country’s rising debt problems will require a government bailout, the Financial Times reported. Fitch downgraded China’s long-term local currency rating from AA- to A+, citing a number of “underlying structural weaknesses” in the Chinese economy, including low average incomes, lagging standards of governance, and a rapid expansion of credit.

China’s local governments may have more than 20 trillion yuan ($3.2 trillion) of debt, former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng said, almost double the figure given in a 2011 report by the National Audit Office, Bloomberg reported. The combined debt of China’s central governments and the nation’s provinces and cities may currently be more than 30 trillion yuan, Xiang, who served as finance minister from 1998 to 2003, said at the Boao Forum for Asia. Local governments had 10.7 trillion yuan of debt at the end of 2010, the auditor said in its report.

Suntech Power Holdings Co., forced to put its Chinese solar unit into bankruptcy last month, began that slide into insolvency in 2009 when customers linked to the founder couldn’t pay their bills and the company booked the sales as revenue anyway, regulatory filings show, Bloomberg reported. Seven buyers backed by an investment firm funded by Suntech and its founder, Shi Zhengrong, accounted for 29 percent of Suntech’s uncollected bills as 2009 ended, according to correspondence between the solar company and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

China’s largest banks posted a decline in bad-loan ratios for 2012 amid the slowest economic expansion in 13 years, signaling policy makers may have averted a surge in defaults. The gauge shrank to 1.33 percent at Agricultural Bank of China Ltd., the nation’s third-largest by market value, from 1.55 percent in 2011, while net income increased by 19 percent, the Beijing-based lender said yesterday. At Bank of China Ltd., the fourth-largest, non-performing loans dropped to 0.95 percent of the total from 1 percent, while profit climbed 12 percent.

The local government in Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd's home town is seeking to bail out China's biggest solar panel maker to stave off its collapse, a person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Thursday. One proposal under consideration is allowing Wuxi Guolian, the local government's investment arm, to take over Suntech's Wuxi business through a restructuring, and test a bankruptcy law introduced in 2007. "Production has to continue," said the source in the city of Wuxi, where Suntech's headquarters are located.

Suntech Power, a Chinese manufacturer that became the world’s largest producer of solar panels by 2011 only to be battered by plummeting prices, announced on Wednesday evening that its main operating subsidiary had been pushed into bankruptcy by eight Chinese banks, the International Herald Tribune reported. Suntech was the Icarus of the solar panel industry, with production that soared year after year on heavy investment, as Western investors bought up its New York-traded shares and its international debt issues.

Suntech, one of the world's biggest solar panel manufacturers, said Monday it has defaulted on a $541 million bond payment in the latest sign of the financial squeeze on the struggling global solar industry, the Associated Press reported. Suntech Power Holdings Ltd.'s announcement was a severe setback for a company lauded by China's Communist government as a leader of efforts to make the country a center of the renewable energy industry.