Hang Seng Index Archives - International Finance

IF Insights: Hong Kong wins back its bankers as listings machine roars again

International Finance Business Desk — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 01:00:45 +0000

Hong Kong is winning back the professionals it lost. Executive search firms and consultancies report finance staff moving in from Singapore, London, Dubai and mainland China, pulled by wealth management mandates and China-related dealmaking.

Recruiters describe enquiry levels and relocation activity as far stronger than the depths of 2023, with momentum building over the past 18 to 24 months.

Demand is concentrated in asset management, private wealth and family offices, with the sharpest growth in roles tied to artificial intelligence integration, compliance and risk.

That is a hard turn from the years after 2019, when street protests, a national security law and some of the world’s strictest pandemic controls emptied trading floors and departure halls in equal measure. The question for anyone weighing a move is whether the pull is a cyclical bounce or something more durable.

What the money actually says
The headline number is striking. Total funds raised in Hong Kong, counting initial public offerings (IPOs) and follow-on issuance, rose 76% year on year to roughly USD 83.5 billion in the first eight months of 2026.

Strip out secondary fundraising and the listings story is stronger still. IPO proceeds alone reached HKUSD 342.4 billion, about USD 43.7 billion, up 153% on the same period a year earlier, according to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

The bourse recorded 106 new listings over the eight months, an 80% increase, and closed August with 2,761 listed companies carrying a combined market value of about HKUSD 47.2 trillion. Average daily turnover ran at HKUSD 282.5 billion, 14% higher than a year ago, and topped HKUSD 300 billion in June and July.

The composition matters more than the totals. KPMG’s mid-year review found Hong Kong raised HKUSD 209.9 billion across 85 IPOs in the first half, its best opening six months in five years, with 24 A+H listings and 13 specialist technology flotations together accounting for more than 70% of proceeds.

Both categories had already passed their full-year 2025 tallies by June. This is a market being rebuilt on mainland corporate demand for offshore capital and on a rule change, the Chapter 18C technology route, that Hong Kong wrote for itself.

Globally, Hong Kong finished the first half second only to Nasdaq, which was carried to the top by SpaceX’s $86.3 billion listing, the largest in history. Second place in a year containing that deal is a respectable result.

The wealth crown
Underneath the listings boom sits a quieter structural shift. Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth Report 2026 found that cross-border wealth booked in Hong Kong rose 10.7% during 2025 to USD 2.95 trillion, narrowly displacing Switzerland at USD 2.94 trillion and making the city the world’s largest offshore booking centre for the first time.

BCG expects the gap to widen rather than close. Hong Kong and Singapore are each forecast to grow cross-border assets at around 9% a year through 2030, against roughly 6% in Switzerland, leaving Hong Kong near USD 4.6 trillion by the end of the decade.

Global cross-border wealth rose 8.4% to USD 15.7 trillion last year, with the top ten booking centres capturing almost 90% of new offshore flows.

BCG describes offshore wealth clustering into two networks. One is anchored by Hong Kong and Singapore and serves mainland Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian capital.

The other runs through Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom and handles European, Middle Eastern and Latin American money.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) remains among the fastest-growing centres, with cross-border wealth up 11.1% last year, but the two large networks are pulling away from everyone else.

For a returning private banker, that is the relevant statistic. Wealth is concentrating into fewer hubs, and Hong Kong is now the largest of them.

The tax bet
Policy has been aimed squarely at the people, not just the capital. In June the government gazetted the Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill 2026, covering funds, family-owned investment holding vehicles and carried interest.

Its most consequential clause would extend the existing zero rate on eligible carried interest to a far wider set of funds, structures and investment professionals, allow carry to be paid directly or through a carry vehicle, and apply retrospectively from the 2025/26 year of assessment.

The target is unmistakable. Singapore’s variable capital company regime and its family office concessions have drawn Asian wealth managers for the better part of a decade. Hong Kong’s answer is a cleaner personal tax outcome for the people who actually decide where to sit.

The bill went to the Legislative Council in late June and, as of September, has still not completed passage. Anyone modelling a move on the strength of it is pricing in an outcome that is probable rather than certain.

Property is the tell
Commercial property offers the least sentimental read on whether firms are genuinely hiring. JLL revised its forecast for Central Grade A office rents upward to growth of 10% to 15% in 2026, from an earlier projection of zero to 5%, citing leasing demand from financial institutions, IPO-related activity, mainland wealth inflows and the anticipated carried interest exemption.

Central’s vacancy rate has fallen for months and overall Grade A vacancy hit a 31-month low in July.

More telling is where new funds choose to plant themselves. JLL reports that in 2025, seven of every ten new fund setups in Asia picked Singapore, against two for Hong Kong.

In 2026 that has flipped, with more than 70% selecting Hong Kong, and one recent month running closer to eight in ten. Office leasing agents also report foreign tenants accounting for 30% to 40% of recent lettings around Kowloon Station.

The visa data supports it.

Hong Kong approved 31,278 employment visas for foreign nationals in 2025, more than double the figure of five years earlier, with financial services visas up 17% to their highest level since 2022.

South Korea, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States led the inflow.

What has not changed
The Hong Kong that professionals are returning to remains structurally different from the one they left. The 2020 national security law criminalises secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, and has been used against opposition politicians, activists and media figures.

The uncertainty it created over where the lines sit was a real factor in the original exodus. Several years of relative calm appear to have eased those worries for many in finance without removing them.

Employment tells a similarly cautious story. Finance and insurance headcount was running near 268,000 in mid-2025, up 4.5% on the year but still below the 287,800 peak of 2021.

Recruiters describe a market that is functional rather than frenzied, with live roles rising faster than offers and banks still wary after over-hiring in 2021 and 2022 and cutting soon after.

Average merit increases have settled at 3% to 5%, a long way from the bidding wars of the last cycle.

The property recovery is also narrow. Central and Tsimshatsui are tightening while Kowloon East vacancy has been running above 20%, and overall Grade A vacancy near 13.5% reflects years of supply arriving into a shrunken market.

Retail is weaker still, with prime shopping mall vacancy hitting a record 13.7% at the end of June.

Cost is the other quiet constraint. Residential prices found a floor in 2025 after a six-year slide and are now expected to climb again, which is good news for owners and awkward for anyone arriving with a family and a relocation budget set two years ago.

Central rents rising 10% to 15% will feed through to employers as well, and eventually into the pay packages that make the move work.

The largest risk is the one embedded in the success. BCG’s own authors note that Hong Kong is cementing its role as China’s gateway to global markets, and that the same concentration ties the city’s trajectory tightly to economic and regulatory developments on the mainland.

A market whose listings pipeline, wealth inflows and equity performance all depend on one source of capital is not diversified, however large the totals.

The read
The macro backdrop is genuinely strong. GDP grew 5.9% in the first quarter of 2026, the fastest since 2021, and 4.3% in the second, prompting the government to lift its full-year forecast to a range of 3.5% to 4.5%.

The Hang Seng Index added roughly 3,000 points in July alone, its biggest monthly gain in nearly two years.

Hong Kong has recovered its position as a venue.

The harder task, rebuilding the assumption that careers can be planned there over a decade rather than a cycle, is further from done.

The visa numbers say people are arriving. The employment numbers say the industry has not yet grown back.

Both can be true, and for now both are.

The post IF Insights: Hong Kong wins back its bankers as listings machine roars again appeared first on International Finance.

Unitree IPO puts a price on China’s humanoid robot bet

International Finance Business Desk — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:08 +0000

Chinese robot maker Unitree has priced its Shanghai initial public offering (IPO) at 150.80 yuan a share, seeking about 6.1 billion yuan, or USD 904 million, in a deal that will make it the first humanoid robot manufacturer listed on the mainland.

The Hangzhou-based company is offering roughly 40.45 million shares, or 10% of its enlarged share capital, on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market. At that price the company is worth around 60.99 billion yuan, close to USD 9 billion.

The reception has been extraordinary even by the standards of China’s technology listings. The offering was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail investors, with the company disclosing odds of roughly 0.018% of receiving shares after a partial reallocation away from the institutional tranche.

A single lot of 500 shares requires a payment of 75,400 yuan, which has not deterred buyers hoping for a first-day pop.

The regulatory path was just as quick. The application was accepted on March 20 and cleared the listing committee on June 1, a span of 73 days and a record for the board.

What investors are actually paying for

The valuation is the story. The offer price implies a diluted price to earnings ratio of 219.23 for 2025 and a price to sales ratio of 35.89, both far above comparable general equipment manufacturers, against a reference industry multiple of 38.56 times.

The company itself warned investors about the risk of a share price decline given the premium. The final price came in about 45% above a market consensus of around 104 yuan after bookbuilding with institutions.

Underneath that multiple is a business growing at a rate few hardware firms manage. Revenue rose to 1.70 billion yuan in 2025 from 392.77 million yuan in 2024 and 159.13 million yuan in 2023, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) above 220%.

Reported net profit was 278.21 million yuan, while net profit attributable to the parent after excluding one-off items, chiefly share-based payment charges, stood at 590.75 million yuan.

The headline 219 times multiple is calculated on the lower of those two figures. Between 2023 and 2025 the company sold 33,294 quadruped robots and 5,632 humanoids, and gross margin on the core business climbed to 60.13%.

The strategic investor list explains part of the enthusiasm. Institutions taking 20% of the issuance include DeepSeek, Tencent’s Qishan Investment, PetroChina’s Kunlun Capital, China Southern Power Grid’s industrial finance arm and Tianyi Capital, alongside three National Social Security Fund portfolios.

DeepSeek alone was allocated 933,390 shares with a 36-month lock-up, a pairing meant to bridge large language models and robot hardware. This is state-adjacent capital and platform capital arriving together, which is how Beijing tends to signal that a sector matters.

Why everyone is rushing the exit door at once

Unitree is not an outlier. It is the first mover in a queue. AgiBot, valued above 20 billion yuan after backing from Tencent, JD.com and SAIC Motor, began its Hong Kong listing process in July, the first among a wave of 30 to 50 Chinese embodied intelligence startups to disclose listing plans.

It has also acquired a controlling stake in Shanghai-listed Swancor Advanced Materials, securing a mainland platform. IPO applications from Leju Robotics and DEEP Robotics have been accepted in Shenzhen and Shanghai respectively.

UBTech, which listed in Hong Kong in December 2023 as the first humanoid robot stock anywhere, saw its shares surge 150% in 2025 against a 32% rise in the Hang Seng Index.

Three forces are pushing companies towards public markets simultaneously. The first is capital intensity. Building humanoids requires actuators, reducers, sensors and factories, the training data problem is unsolved, and the burn rate is high while revenue is thin.

The second is the policy window. The 15th Five-Year Plan covering 2026 to 2030 elevates robotics and embodied intelligence from a niche subsidy target into the connective tissue of China’s economic modernisation strategy, with component localisation targets written into the top-level document rather than into subordinate ministry plans.

A 1 trillion yuan state venture fund for artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and emerging technologies sits behind it. Listing while that support is explicit is simply cheaper than listing later.

The third force is the valuation cycle itself. Sector financing in China reached 73.5 billion yuan in 2025, and the first two months of 2026 alone exceeded 20 billion yuan. Private rounds at those levels create pressure for public exits before enthusiasm cools.

The industrial base beneath the hype

The humanoid narrative sits on top of an automation build-out that is already the largest in history. China accounted for 54% of all industrial robots installed worldwide in 2024, or 295,000 of 542,000 units, and its installed base of about two million machines is roughly 4.5 times that of Japan in second place. Global operational stock stood at 4.66 million.

More telling is who supplies them. The share of local suppliers in Chinese domestic installations rose from 30% in 2020 to 57% in 2024, and Chinese firms now hold 85% of the domestic metal and machinery segment. For the first time, Chinese robot makers sold more units at home than foreign competitors.

China also became a net exporter of industrial robots for the first time in 2025, and first-half 2026 exports reached 6.29 billion yuan, up 18.6% year on year, shipped to 141 countries and regions.

That is the import substitution story Made in China 2025 promised, delivered a decade later in a sector Western suppliers once dominated.

One caveat is worth stating plainly. On robot density, China is not yet the leader. Using updated labour market data from its own statistics bureau, the International Federation of Robotics puts China at 166 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, sixth in Asia and 22nd worldwide, against 307 in the United States.

Western Europe reached a record 267 and North America 204. China’s advantage is absolute scale, not saturation, which is precisely why the runway is long.

China against the West

On volume, the humanoid contest is already lopsided. Roughly 16,000 humanoid robots were installed worldwide in 2025, with China accounting for more than 80%, according to Counterpoint Research, which put AgiBot on 30.4% of global installations and Unitree on 26.4%.

Omdia ranks AgiBot first on 5,168 units and a 39% share, a reading Unitree disputes with its own claim of more than 5,500 humanoids shipped. American rivals including Tesla and Figure each shipped a few hundred units at most.

On money, the West leads by a distance. Figure is valued at about USD 39 billion after a Series C exceeding USD 1 billion in September 2025, roughly four times Unitree’s listed value, with 1X at around USD 10 billion and Apptronik at about USD 5.5 billion.

Tesla remains the wild card, with Optimus V3 expected to enter mass production in the second half of 2026 on a converted Fremont line. Unitree’s own prospectus names Optimus and new entrants from Chinese carmakers as material competitive risks.

The historical pattern from solar panels, drones and electric vehicles is that scale wins once the underlying technology commoditises, which is the bet embedded in Unitree’s multiple.

Automation as industrial policy

For an economy facing a shrinking working-age population and rising wages, robots are a labour supply story as much as a technology story.

Automation is how China intends to keep its manufacturing base competitive while the demographic base erodes, and how it plans to cut dependence on imported precision components.

The Robot Plus initiative and the AI Plus Manufacturing roadmap aim to double manufacturing robot density by 2030, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has set up a standardisation committee for humanoid robots, and China is now leading formulation of international standards for elder-care robots, echoing its earlier standards campaigns in 5G and high-speed rail.

The risks arrived before the shares did. Overseas sales generated 731.66 million yuan in 2025, or 43.65% of main business revenue, and on July 28 the United States Federal Communications Commission added foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List, blocking equipment authorisation for models not already cleared.

Unitree certified its current lineup weeks earlier, so those grants stand, but the North American path for new models is closed for now. The Pentagon has separately listed the company as having alleged military links, which Beijing rejects.

Growth is also cooling. First-half 2026 revenue guidance of 1.05 billion to 1.13 billion yuan implies growth of 36% to 45%, against 333% a year earlier, and adjusted net profit is guided to fall by between 6% and 22%.

A 219 times earnings multiple leaves no room for that trend to continue. Investors chasing lottery odds of 0.018% may find that out.

The post Unitree IPO puts a price on China’s humanoid robot bet appeared first on International Finance.