The Chinese Firm That Treats a 26-Story Tower Like Flat-Pack Furniture

BROAD Sustainable Building has quietly redefined what a construction company can do, erecting more than 30 high-rise towers faster than most developers complete a single floor plate.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-05-20

On January 7, 2024, a crew of roughly 100 workers arrived at a site in Xiangyin County, Hunan Province, with a mobile crane, a tower crane, and a convoy of trucks carrying what looked like oversized shipping containers. Each unit was 12 meters long, 3 meters high, and 2.4 meters wide. The workers lifted them into position and bolted them together, stacking them one on top of another. There was no concrete pour, no months of masonry, no welding on site. Four days later, on January 11, a fully assembled 26-story residential tower stood on the lot: 208 furnished apartments, 14,000 square meters of living space, electricity and water ready to turn on.

Born from a Disaster

The origin story of BROAD Sustainable Building (BSB) runs directly through the rubble of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a 7.9-magnitude catastrophe that killed 90,000 people and flattened 6.5 million buildings, including schools and apartment towers that folded without warning. Zhang Yue, the founder and chairman of BROAD Group, had already built a significant fortune manufacturing industrial air conditioning systems from his base in Changsha. He watched the concrete apartment blocks collapse and drew a conclusion: the construction industry was building the wrong way.

Zhang founded BSB in 2009 to do something most people would consider impossible: apply the principles of mass manufacturing to high-rise buildings. Factory-made components. Lean production lines. Standardized modules. Quality control at every stage before a single unit reaches a site. His thesis was that the cheapest, most efficient, most earthquake-resistant buildings could only be produced in factories. The concrete-and-rebar tradition that governed global construction was, in his view, an anachronism.

The company debuted publicly at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, where it assembled a six-story structure in a single day. The world noticed. In 2011, BSB completed the T-30, a 30-story hotel, in 15 days. In 2015, it erected J57, a 57-story mixed-use tower, in 19 days: three floors per day, captured in a time-lapse YouTube video that accumulated millions of views and made international headlines. In 2021, a 10-story residential block was completed in 28 hours and 45 minutes. The Jindu Holon Building in January 2024 was the 16th generation of this system, with all prior experience baked in.

The B-CORE System

The engineering at the heart of BSB's speed record is a patented material called B-CORE. It is a sandwich structure composed of two stainless steel plates with an array of stainless steel tubes fused between them, brazed in a special oven at 2,000 degrees Celsius using copper foil to bond metals with different melting points. One 40-by-8-foot B-CORE slab can be produced every two minutes.

"B-CORE is composed of two stainless steel plates with an array of stainless steel tubes fused between them," said Sunny Wang, President of BROAD USA. "Because the metals have different melting points, they can stick together very strongly. It looks very simple, but it is super-light and super-strong."

The choice of stainless steel, rather than ordinary structural steel, was deliberate. Standard steel corrodes. But BSB's switch to stainless, which happened approximately five years before the Jindu build, was driven by a mechanical property: ductility. Stainless steel can absorb tensile stress, making a building assembled from it capable of flexing rather than cracking during a seismic event. That property also removes the constraint on height. "There is actually no limitation for the height," said Wang. "Because we take advantage of the stainless steel, it is strong enough that we can go as high as we can design it."

Because the walls in the Holon Building are non-load-bearing, BSB can produce a very small number of standardized module types at high volume, then configure the interior flexibly. The Jindu tower's 264 modules were either room modules or lift modules. The entire building left the factory with wiring, ductwork, flooring, air conditioning, and energy-recovery ventilation already installed. On site, there was no welding. Workers lifted modules with cranes, lowered them into position, and bolted them to the units below. The only things missing from a move-in-ready unit were movable appliances.

A Building That Can Move

The feature that separates BSB's system from every other prefab or modular approach is reversibility. The same bolted connections that allow a 26-story tower to be erected in five days also allow it to be disassembled. Load the modules back onto trucks, ship them to a new site, and reassemble. The Jindu Holon Building can, in principle, be relocated.

This changes the fundamental economics of a building. In conventional real estate development, a structure is a permanent liability attached to a specific piece of land. It depreciates in place. It cannot follow demand. In the Holon system, the building is closer to capital equipment: an asset that can be redeployed. BSB has invested more than $650 million in research and production capacity. Its Xiangyin factory spans 230,000 square meters and is capable of producing 5 million square meters of building components per year.

The business model that results from this looks less like traditional construction and more like a logistics product. Buildings are manufactured in China, containerized, shipped to wherever demand exists, and assembled by a small crew. The intellectual property travels with the steel.

Going Global

For years, BSB's portfolio was almost entirely domestic. That changed decisively in December 2023, when Mohamed Ali Alabbar, founder of Emaar Properties and chairman of Eagle Hills, flew to BROAD Town in Changsha to sign a strategic cooperation agreement with Zhang Yue. Alabbar's prior credits include the Burj Khalifa, still the tallest structure ever built by conventional methods. His willingness to partner with a Chinese modular manufacturer represented a meaningful endorsement from the most credentialed real estate developer in the Gulf.

The result was the Earth Tower in Zayed City, Abu Dhabi, completed in late 2025. Its 259 modules were manufactured in 30 days, then hoisted and installed on site in 96 hours. The building contains 150 residential units across studios and one-, two-, and three-bedroom layouts. Shun Li, Deputy General Manager of BROAD Holon, described the project's logic: "By transferring almost all construction processes to the factory, we can effectively ensure quality, significantly shorten the construction period, and reduce construction waste and carbon emissions, while minimizing disruption to the surrounding area of the construction site."

Eagle Hills announced in late 2025 that future towers ranging from 15 to 30 stories are already in the pipeline, with an ambition to begin and complete projects within six months at costs comparable to conventional construction.

BSB also has active projects in the Philippines, and BROAD USA, operating from New Jersey, is pursuing deals across the United States and Canada. Sunny Wang framed the American opportunity in terms of the housing shortage directly: "The solution to the critical housing shortage in the US is to build modular, which delivers a project cycle up to 50% faster than site-built construction. But in addition to modular, we need to build high to maximize the use of land, particularly in the urban environment where land is at a premium."

The New York City Mayor's office issued BROAD USA a Certificate of Recognition at a recent industry event. The city has a standing shortage of tens of thousands of affordable units.

The Scale of the Disruption

The context for what BSB is selling is a global construction industry in deep dysfunction. A 2025 McKinsey report found that global construction productivity advanced only 10% over 22 years, one-fifth of the growth seen in other sectors. A separate McKinsey analysis found that sector productivity actually declined 8% between 2020 and 2022. The United States alone faces a shortage of approximately 3.7 million housing units, according to Freddie Mac estimates for late 2024. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia face structurally similar gaps.

Modular construction accounted for just 3% of newly completed multifamily buildings in the US in 2024 and around 5% of the broader construction market. Every serious attempt to change those numbers has run into the same headwinds: local building codes, skilled labor shortages for factory work, difficulty transporting large modules, and financing communities that lack established underwriting frameworks for volumetric modular high-rises.

BSB's approach sidesteps several of these obstacles by operating at a scale and with a vertical integration that western modular competitors have not achieved. Its Xiangyin factory, at 230,000 square meters, is a dedicated industrial plant for one product. Its module dimensions are calibrated to standard shipping container specifications, which means it can move product using existing global logistics infrastructure. And its track record across 30-plus buildings, including structures delivered in the UAE and with projects progressing in the US, gives institutional partners a data set that most modular firms cannot offer.

Critics of rapid prefab construction have historically raised safety and long-term durability questions. Zhang has consistently answered with the earthquake resistance argument: BSB buildings are designed and independently verified to survive magnitude 9 seismic events, a standard that exceeds code requirements in most markets. The stainless steel frame, which eliminates the corrosion and concrete spalling that afflicts conventional buildings over decades, is positioned as a lifespan advantage as well.

A Platform Looking for Markets

The most significant question surrounding BROAD Sustainable Building is not whether its technology works. The Jindu build, the Earth Tower in Abu Dhabi, and the 30-plus buildings across China have settled that question. The question is whether the regulatory, financial, and cultural infrastructure of target markets can adapt quickly enough to absorb it.

A building assembled in five days from Chinese-manufactured modules challenges planning departments designed for multi-year timelines. It challenges financing structures built around draw schedules tied to site progress milestones. It challenges unions in markets where construction employment is organized around site trades. These are not trivial frictions. The Sky City project, BSB's ambitious plan to build the world's tallest skyscraper in Changsha in 90 days, stalled for years after two investors withdrew and government approvals were delayed. Even Zhang acknowledged in the aftermath that revenue growth was harder to project than he had believed.

But the Earth Tower completion in Abu Dhabi, delivered for one of the most credentialed real estate developers alive, changes the conversation. Eagle Hills plans more towers. BROAD USA is in active discussions with American developers. Jeremy Zimman, BROAD's marketing director, put the ambition plainly: "The Holon modular system enables the construction of tall residential buildings at great speed, and we look forward to deploying this technology to shorten the construction cycle and alleviate the severe housing shortage in the US and Canada."

Somewhere between a logistics company, a materials science firm, and a real estate developer, BROAD Sustainable Building has built something that most of the industry assumed was impossible. The question it poses to every market it enters is whether the incumbents who have shaped the rules of construction for the past century are willing to learn from a firm that treats a 26-story tower like flat-pack furniture.