Vanke is the No. 1 home builder in China. Toll Brothers is a US luxury home builder. Comparing the profitability of those two are not really comparing apple to apple. But, the buyers of Vanke homes in China are mostly middle class, or in other words, their relative affulence level in China is about same the US buyers of Toll homes. Anyway here goes the data from Reuters (via Google Finance). I can see the following from the data:

1) Vanke is more profitable then Toll, because real estate is a long term growth industry in China. This is from net profit margine and operating margin.

2) Margin for both companies are declining, more so for TOL than Vanke. It’s understandable for TOL because of the weak US housing market. For Vanke it could be two things: increasing competition; sacrefying profitability for growth.

TOL (Source):
Quarterly(Jul ‘07) Annual(2006) Annual(TTM)
Net Profit Margin 2.18% 11.22% 5.51%
Operating Margin 3.72% 16.75% 9.13%
EBITD Margin - 19.24% 9.28%
Return on Average Assets 1.43% 9.87% 3.95%
Return on Average Equity 2.98% 22.24% 8.54%
Employees 5,542 - -

Vanke/000002 (source)
Quarterly(Sep ‘07) Annual(2006) Annual(TTM)
Net Profit Margin 9.42% 12.93% 12.88%
Operating Margin 14.14% 19.35% 19.08%
EBITD Margin - 20.26% -
Return on Average Assets 1.46% 6.55% 4.42%
Return on Average Equity 4.76% 18.58% 15.05%
Employees 13,402 - -