One of the world’s largest asset management companies is pulling out of Hong Kong and making Shanghai its main office for business in Asia.
Those businesses mostly serve « institutional clients, and not the individual investors that are our primary strategic focus, » said Rebecca Katz, senior communications adviser at Vanguard, in an email to CNN Business. « We believe our greatest future opportunity to help change the way the world invests is to focus on individual investors and the intermediaries who serve them. » Beijing has strict control over Chinese capital markets, leaving small-time investors with few options to invest outside of property and the stock market. Even so, retail investing is booming: There are roughly 170 million individual investors in the country, an 80% jump from five years ago, according to the China Securities Depository and Clearing Company. The growth has been driven in part by gains in the country’s stock markets, which have recovered from a meltdown in 2015 and 2016.
