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By Leo Zhang Despite weak external demand and slowing domestic growth, affluent Chinese investors have still been rising both in number and wealth and are increasingly demanding financial tools against uncertainties. As the amount of rich Asians surpassed North Americans for the first time last year, the Chinese people accounted for nearly 17 percent of the region 3.37 million high net worth individuals, trailing Japan 54 percent, according to a report issued by Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management in September. Total wealth of these Chinese HNWIs increased 1.8 percent year on year in 2011, compared with a 1 percent drop...

2020

By Jorge Luis Yu While many powerful countries are being affected with their own economic issues, the world is magnified by the impressive growth that China has experienced in the past few years. China openness and the current development of its business and financial environment have been giving its citizens greater opportunities of economic success and improvement of their life standards. As result of this outstanding economic growth, China has become the world major incubator of high net worth individuals. According to the renowned Hurun Wealth Report, by the end of 2011 in China, there were approximately 1,020,000 individuals identified...

2020

By Michael LiuManaging DirectorCIL Group Ltd This time last year, Warren Buffett and Gates Foundation founder Bill Gates invited 50 of China's richest people to dinner and exchanged ideas about charity. Related media reports attracted people's attention. In this long period after the event, the term "foundation" has been frequently appearing in various mass media on China. As Warren Buffett and Bill Gates said, 30 years after the launch of China's reform and opening up policies Chinese rich people have become the first generation of affluent growing up amid the expansion of global emerging markets. Unlike a Western rich family...

2020

By Iain Manley. Over the last ten years, somebody on the Chinese mainland has become a US dollar millionaire every six minutes. In 2001, despite a decade of strong growth, China had only 124,000 individuals with a net worth of over ten million yuan. By May of this year, that number had risen to 960,000, after rocketing from 310,000 to 825,000 between 2006 and 2009. These numbers are both staggering and conservative: ten million yuan is, after all, a good deal more than one million dollars but is the benchmark used by China most important rich list, the Hurun Report...

2020

Starting from nowhere, foundations have come to challenge trusts as the most effective means of asset protection. Coming from relative obscurity 10 years ago, private foundations are now among the cornerstones of global asset planning markets, and look to be displacing trusts as the go to structure for those who need security and privacy for their assets.Private foundations were originally pioneered by civil law countries, most notably Panama and Lichtenstein, that wanted to provide the security of a trust, without the uncomfortable need to hand over your belongings to a third party. Only recently have civil law countries been jumping...

2020

Despite the regulatory problems with China's trust laws, there is still a place for Chinese formed trusts. The sudden flush of cash coming from China's famous mega-IPOs can be all too tempting to the taxman. Tracy Zhang, a tax professional at KPMG argues that private companies preparing to go public are those that can most benefit from a judicious use of a legal trust modeled on the Chinese system. A company domiciled in China can't pack up its steel mills and head to the Caymans, particularly if they are about to list in Shanghai, so a Chinese structure are often...

2020

By Iain Manley. Chinese banks were comparatively slow to take wealth management seriously. Foreign banks beat them into the market in 2005, when AIG opened up an office in Shanghai, and by the time Bank of China started rolling out the country first centres for restigious wealth management along with a number of private banking centres in 2007, some of the industry biggest players including HSBC, Standard Chartered and Credit Suisse had either set up shop on the Chinese mainland or introduced private banking services to their existing retail offerings. The foreign banks motives were straightforward: China mints hundreds of...

2020

By Frances Emery. Today, they are emblems of affluence, competing for the wealth of investors from every corner of the globe, but most of the world's major offshore financial centers had similarly humble beginnings. As global finance shifts eastward - with Chinese business people managing their assets and investments with more knowledge and savvy every year-looking to the foundations on which today's thriving offshore financial centers were built is an exercise that reveals as much about the industry's past as its present and its future. In some regards, the respective development of offshore finance in the Americas and Asia occurred...

2020