Chinese funds’ US$35.9 billion bet on Hong Kong stocks fuels world’s best rally
Net purchases via the Stock Connect’s southbound channel helped expand Hong Kong’s stock market size by US$596 billion this year
Mainland Chinese investors have ploughed US$35.9 billion into stocks listed in Hong Kong this year in some of the most aggressive purchases on record, as a re-rating of the nation’s biggest technology companies helped fuel a world-beating market rally.
Onshore funds and traders spent HK$152.8 billion (US$19.7 billion) on stocks in February through the Stock Connect programme in addition to HK$125.6 billion invested in January, according to data compiled by the stock exchange. The inflows trailed only the record HK$310.6 billion in January 2021.
E-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the Post, China’s biggest chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), and smartphone maker Xiaomi were among investors’ top 10 favourite bets, the data showed.
Chinese start-up DeepSeek took the tech world by storm in late December and January after introducing two new artificial intelligence (AI) models, which were developed at a fraction of the cost typically incurred by US pacesetters. Its breakthrough sparked a rout on Wall Street and powered a bull run in Chinese tech stocks in Hong Kong.
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Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
“The trend [of inflow] is expected to continue in the long run because the dynamic of the re-rating of Chinese tech stocks remains intact,” said Yi Huan, an analyst at Huatai Securities in Hong Kong. “We believe the theme will further play out.”