Chinese Fund Managers Look to Diversify An equity bear market has made life difficult for Chinese asset managers, but some have managed to buck the trend.
Earlier this year E Fund Management Co. sold 1.1 billion yuan ($175 million) worth of its new RQFII Fixed Income fund to Hong Kong investors. The success of the fund, part of the renminbi qualified foreign institutional investor program that Beijing launched last December, helped the Guangzhou-based firm increase its assets under management by about $2 billion, to $24 billion, at the end of March. The total places E Fund in fourth place on the China 20, Institutional Investor’s exclusive ranking of China’s 20 largest fund managers.
Most firms weren’t so successful. Of the 19 returning funds on the list, ten saw their assets decline over the past year.
There is no change at the top of the ranking, although the gap between firms narrowed a bit. China Asset Management Co. retains its No. 1 spot even though its assets declined to $40.7 billion from $43.5 billion in 2011. Harvest Fund Management Co. remains in the No. 2 slot with $36.3 billion in assets, down from $38.6 billion, while Bosera Asset Management Co. returns in third place with $29.7 billion, up slightly from $28.3 billion.
Methodology Institutional Investor’s eighth annual ranking identifies China’s top 20 fund managers by assets. New York–based Senior Editor Jane B. Kenney, with the assistance of Researcher Joe Lam in Hong Kong, compiled the ranking from a variety of sources, including questionnaires filled out by the institutions themselves. II refined this data through follow-up e-mails and telephone calls. When official data were unavailable, II obtained figures from websites and other public sources. Figures for 2012 and 2011 are as of March 31; where necessary, values were converted from yuan to dollars using exchange rates on those dates.