A panoramic view of Hegang Xing'an Coal Mine of Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group Co Photo: CFP

A major State-owned mining company in Northeast China is fighting for its life as it scrambles to sell cash-generating assets such as hotels, but those moves may not be enough to save Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group Co from liquidation, analysts said.

Longmay Group, the largest mining group in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, has gone from crisis to crisis in recent years, with debt rising and wages unpaid. Its problems stem largely from the ongoing decline in the domestic coal market and its own inefficient management, the analysts said.

In the first three quarters of 2015, the group recorded a net loss of 3.38 billion yuan ($519.5 million), according to domestic coal news website cwestc.com. But even as industry conditions have worsened, the group - as the major State-owned enterprise in Heilongjiang Province - has been saddled with "social responsibilities" such as supporting local hospitals and making social security payments, media reports noted.

Its debt to total assets ratio was over 80 percent as of January 2015, according to media reports.

No public financial report from Longmay Group is available for the moment.

About 1.5 billion yuan worth of assets were put up for sale by Longmay from March 17 to 21, domestic coal industry website coalchina.org.cn reported on Monday, referring to a list on the website of the Heilongjiang Assets and Equity Exchange in Harbin, the provincial capital.

Those properties include office buildings, kindergarten buildings and clubs belonging to Longmay Group. For example, an office building of its subsidiary Shuangyashan Coal Group Co is on offer with an estimated value of 35.6 million yuan.

"Putting its assets on sale shows that the group is fighting to stay alive," Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Monday.

Lin noted that the group is likely to make a profit if it can sell such properties because land prices have been increasing in recent years. 

A source close to Longmay Group told the Global Times on Monday that he was "saddened" by the move to sell assets.

"It's more liquidation than cost saving," he noted. The source declined to be identified because he is not allowed to speak to the media.

Longmay Group could not be reached by press time on Monday by the Global Times.

Recently, the group has transferred employees to new positions at various subsidiaries in places such as Jixi, Hegang, Shuangya-shan and Qitaihe elsewhere in Heilongjiang Province. Those moves are likely to spark legal action by those affected, an employee in Hegang told the Global Times over the weekend.

"They are rewriting our contracts, which will change our status as State-owned enterprise workers to dispatched workers, and that will jeopardize our interests," he said, declining to give his name because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Employees of the group received two months' salary on March 14, two days after the province's governor admitted that his previous statement was wrong and the mining group did in fact owe salaries to its workers, according to media reports.

However, some experts said that Longmay Group has lost all its advantages in the coal mining industry, and selling assets is more of a "farewell" than a means to survival, Zhang Zhibin, Shanghai-based industry analyst at Eternal Fortune Capital, told the Global Times on Monday.

"With even leading coal producers overseas - for example, BHP Billiton - having been hit by the sluggish market, there's little hope for companies like Longmay Group," Zhang said.

Ma Jingjing contributed to the story