LEE PITCHES CITY AS PRIME PLACE FOR INVESTMENT
Hong Kong has long been in business of thriving and that is not about to change, chief executive tells the world’s corporate leaders at summit
Hong Kong government officials pitched the city as a prime destination for investment despite economic headwinds and encouraged finance leaders to spend big as they touted its unique connection to the mainland markets at the HSBC Global Investment Summit yesterday.
“Hong Kong was a fishing village when HSBC opened here in 1865,” Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said as the event opened at the Conrad Hotel. “And while much has changed since then, one crucial fact remains true. That is the endlessly reinventing city of Hong Kong and the spirit of the people.”
The city was not just “the place for business”, but also “a place for you to work hard and play hard and, do remember, spend hard”, he added.
HSBC is hosting the largest investment conference in Hong Kong to fill a void left by Credit Suisse. More than 2,500 market professionals and 300 corporate executives are gathering in the city this week to discuss issues challenging the industry and the world.
Hundreds of guests crowded the lobby of the hotel, where Credit Suisse held its swansong conference last year, and the ballroom was quickly filled to capacity during the morning sessions. Attendees spilled over to two floors above the conference room where they were relegated to watching the proceedings via live streaming.
A gala dinner was held for guests last night at the M+ museum, while HSBC said about 5,000 meetings had been arranged for attendees to discuss issues in technology, sustainability, climate change and the Asia-Middle East corridor, among others.
“Hong Kong has long been in the business of thriving,” Lee said. “That is not about to change. I’m confident that as global investors, you can see the far-reaching promise of Hong Kong for yourselves.”
The government was committed to enhancing the competitiveness and liquidity of the Hong Kong markets, Lee said.
This included measures that had been implemented, such as reducing the stamp duty on stock transfers, streamlining the regime for initial public offerings and targeting specialised technology sectors to boost competitiveness, as well as additional initiatives under consideration to boost investor services, such as improving the transaction mechanism, he said.
Hong Kong’s rule of law, judiciary system, and free flow of capital, people and information collectively enabled the city to play a unique role as a superconnector between the mainland and the rest of the world, Lee said.
The city had been actively engaging with mainland authorities, and would continue to improve the Wealth Connect, Bond Connect and green finance initiatives, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said during a fireside chat yesterday.
China was continuing to transform its economy and open its capital markets, presenting strong medium- and long-term prospects for international investors, particularly in the consumer space, HSBC group chairman Mark Tucker said in his keynote address.
“We strongly believe in the potential of the [Greater Bay Area] region, supply-chain efficiency and advanced manufacturing capabilities, with a competitive international talent pool,” Tucker said.
Along with this, Hong Kong would be the key gateway for tapping emerging opportunities and would play a crucial role in diversified portfolios as a wealth and investment hub, he added.
As Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates diversified their economies, opportunities were also being created connecting Asia to the Middle East, he said.
“Hong Kong’s openness and connectivity mean that it’s ideally placed to retain and further strengthen its status as a connector between mainland China, Asia and the rest of the world,” Tucker said.
Hong Kong’s biggest licensed cryptocurrency exchange operator, HashKey Group, has launched a new global trading platform that it hopes will help the company overtake US-based giant Coinbase in trading volume within five years.
The new exchange, HashKey Global, operates with a digital asset business licence issued in Bermuda.
It is now available globally with one big caveat: for regulatory reasons, markets like the United States, the mainland and Hong Kong could not use it, HashKey Group chief operating officer Livio Weng said last week on the sidelines of the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, a cryptocurrency conference organised by the firm.
The group, established in Hong Kong in 2018, operates the local HashKey Exchange, which was approved by the city’s regulator last August to serve retail investors under the new cryptocurrency regulatory regime. The exchange can so far only offer bitcoin and ether for retail trading.
HashKey Exchange had more than 170,000 registered users, Weng said.
It hosted about US$35 million in 24-hour trading volume yesterday, according to market tracker CoinGecko, which ranks the platform 15th according to a trust score that tries to measure legitimacy of trading data.
However, HashKey’s volume is still a trickle compared with some of the world’s largest exchanges.
Binance had US$6.3 billion in 24-hour normalised trading volume by midday yesterday, while OKX recorded more than US$2.1 billion, CoinGecko showed.
HashKey is hoping a new global exchange will supercharge its market position. Weng said the company intended to have more trading volume than Coinbase, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, across all HashKey Group platforms by 2029.
“We have seen their data and we don’t think that’ll be difficult,” Weng said.
The global exchange could be particularly appealing to overseas Chinese and investors across Asian markets that did not block offshore cryptocurrency exchanges, he added.
Facing intense competition from existing exchanges around the world, HashKey Global had an advantage as a compliant platform that also offered a smooth experience, Weng said.
Most of the world’s major exchanges were either “easy to use but not compliant” or “compliant but hard to use”, he said.
HashKey Group, whose businesses include investment firm HashKey Capital and an asset management arm, is among a range of cryptocurrency firms banking on Hong Kong’s embrace of the virtual asset industry.
While public perception of the sector took a plunge last year following high-profile scandals, including the collapse of FTX in late 2022 and a local fraud involving the lesser-known JPEX exchange a year later, confidence has rebounded in recent months after a surge in bitcoin prices in the new year to a record of more than US$73,000 last month.
Apart from a mandatory licensing regime for cryptocurrency exchanges, Hong Kong is moving to regulate stablecoins and over-the-counter cryptocurrency shops. Many are also expecting an imminent approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the city.
We have seen [Coinbase’s] data and we don’t think that’ll be difficult
LIVIO WENG, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, HASHKEY GROUP