Chexit: The Global Asset Managers Exiting China

CommentaryFidelity International (FIL) is reportedly the latest fund manager to plan a pullout from its China fund. FIL launched a wholly-owned subsidiary in Shanghai three years ago, but a lack of demand from retail investors led to disappointing growth.Reuters first reported the story. According to its sources, “A combination of fierce local competition, frequent leadership turnover and chronic struggles to build scale ultimately convinced global FIL executives that the China retail venture was untenable.”FIL has $1.18 trillion in assets under management (AUM). It started its China fund in 2023. The next year, Reuters saw an internal FIL document that said it needed more than $14 billion in assets to become profitable. After several years, it had reportedly reached only about $670 million (less than 5 percent of the goal) and began planning an exit.Fidelity follows multiple other global asset managers that are backing away from China amid domestic competition and geopolitical tensions. These include Schroders, Legal & General, and Vanguard. The companies that left China were in stiff competition with domestic funds and Western China funds that had typically first been established through joint ventures (JVs) with Chinese institutions.In 2019, Beijing invited global fund managers, for the first time, to establish wholly-owned China funds. The regime framed the invitation as part of a trade agreement, and the latter sought access to the Chinese public’s $12.8 trillion in investable assets. For some of the international investors, it did not end well.In 2020 and 2021, respectively, the Chinese regime issued permits to BlackRock and Neuberger Berman to start such funds. They both had ties to the regime and headquarters in Shanghai. In 2021, BlackRock raised $1 billion for its fund in its first week, which impressed other institutional investors. It was the first mutual fund owned by foreigners to be granted permission to sell directly to Chinese customers, and it did very well, at least at first.Several other large asset managers converted their JVs into wholly-owned funds by buying out their JV partners. These then became the largest and most successful wholly foreign-owned public fund houses in China.Some institutions, including Fidelity, Schroders, and BlackRock, launched greenfield, wholly-owned China funds, but they tended to be smaller than the converted JVs, delivered lower returns, and were disappointing in terms of growth. In 2018, Vanguard’s Asia CEO mentioned a possible future China AUM of $5 trillion. But Vanguard was the first to close its Shanghai office in 2023.The next year, Legal & General canceled plans to get a China business license and reduced its presence in Shanghai by about 80 percent.Pedestrians wear masks as they walk past an HSBC branch in Hong Kong on April 28, 2020. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty ImagesSchroders, a British firm with AUM of $1.1 trillion, established a wholly-owned China fund management unit in 2023. But three years later, Schroders only managed $250 million. In May, news broke that the company planned to sell its China funds to a wholly-owned China unit of Neuberger Berman.China has a $5.9 trillion public fund market dominated by domestic fund managers. Even as the smaller foreign-owned funds cut their losses in China, the larger ones are holding on.JP Morgan Asset Management China is the largest foreign-owned fund with $34 billion in AUM. Manulife China has $17 billion, and Morgan Stanley China has $4.5 billion. These three funds started as joint ventures and then bought out their Chinese partners. Their returns tend to be better than those of new ventures, with about a third of their funds getting above 10 percent.Most new foreign-owned funds posted a year-to-date return of less than 5 percent in June, which is far below the returns of the leading domestic fund managers. The top 11 Chinese companies each have more than $147 billion in AUM. Yicai has noted that the best 15 domestic funds had returns of at least 90 percent, which likely attracted some retail investors.Domestic funds reportedly have multiple advantages over western funds, including brand recognition, established online and bank distribution channels, and low-overhead index and money-market businesses dominated by locals.According to a Yicai Global source, “Most domestic fund managers have spent decades building out full product lines, gaining deep experience, earning a track record investors recognize, building local sales networks, and learning Chinese investors’ preferences.”Other Yicai sources note that to compete, foreign companies should localize their management, research, investment, and sales teams.There may be other advantages less frequently noted. A Fitch Ratings analyst put it bluntly when discussing the entrance of foreign banks into China’s retail banking space in 2007.“Foreign banks don’t break people’s arms when they don’t repay them, like some Chinese banks might,” the analyst said. “They can’t operate like that, so what they have to focus on is the high end of the retail market.”Another challenge is unspoken regime bias against foreign companies, combined with overregulation. In June, for example, China’s top securities regulator targeted algorithmic trading, which is one of the West’s bright spots, not only internationally but in China trading.The measures hit domestic algo traders as well, but they block one avenue in which foreign firms hold an advantage. Regular domestic managers have closer ties to regime agencies and exchange relationships and, therefore, better access to market data and regulatory largesse.This isn’t the first time that foreign banks have been squeezed in China to the advantage of domestic actors. The British pioneered modern banking in Shanghai in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Banks from other countries, including Germany, France, Japan, and the United States, entered later.But after the revolution of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over the most lucrative businesses of the banks and forced them to maintain idle workers. This forced most of them out in the 1950s. The two major foreign banks that remained, Standard Chartered (under a prior name) and HSBC, lost market share. Starting in 1979, the CCP gradually reopened its financial sector to foreign entities while ensuring that its domestic banks remained dominant.With an uneven playing field and unfair referees, China is not the best of opportunities for Western investors. In the case of companies like Fidelity, Schroders, Vanguard, and Legal & General, the numbers did not add up and probably never will.Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.