Hong Kong market seen funding more ‘jaw-dropping’ Chinese start-up innovations
Hong Kong’s capital markets are poised to provide the long-term funding that will help start-ups in mainland China deliver more “jaw-dropping” innovations in coming years, speakers at an investment summit said on Tuesday.
“China has many enterprises that are low-key, but they are not ‘lying flat’, as many of them are working very hard on various innovation and technology developments,” Bonnie Chan Yiting, CEO of bourse operator Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), said on the opening day of the three-day HSBC Global Investment Summit 2025 in Hong Kong.
Thanks to recent listing reforms, HKEX is ready to support biotechnology and other technology firms in raising funds in Hong Kong, even if some of them have not yet earned any income, she said during a panel discussion.
“Hong Kong, where many institutional investors and sovereign funds trade, can provide the long-term funding needed by these start-ups to provide more jaw-dropping technology breakthroughs in future,” she said.
Li Yimei, CEO of China Asset Management, said many investors were investing for short-term returns, so the Chinese government recently called on insurance companies to invest more in stocks to provide long-term funding for these start-ups.
“For investors, it is the beginning of a long-term journey to invest in China’s innovation story, yielding benefits in the future,” she said. “They need to be patient as many of these technology developments need huge sums of investment for many years to achieve a breakthrough. But [artificial intelligence start-up] DeepSeek has proven that Chinese start-ups have the ability to deliver technological breakthroughs.”
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek’s release of two powerful but cost-effective large language models in January triggered a rally that raised the Hang Seng Index by more than 20 per cent so far this year, after advancing 18 per cent in 2024. The Hang Seng Tech Index has surged nearly 26 per cent in 2025.
After DeepSeek’s emergence, international investors had shown stronger interest in investing in or forming partnerships with Hong Kong and mainland start-ups, as the breakthrough strengthened their confidence in China’s technology capabilities, said Clara Chan, CEO of Hong Kong Investment Corporation (HKIC).
“The HKIC team has visited and met with many youngsters in mainland China who have different projects in different innovations,” she said. “We would like to help them to use Hong Kong as a base to build up partnerships with overseas investors.”
Investors in the Middle East and Southeast Asia had shown increasing interest in working with Hong Kong-based start-ups, she said.
HKEX’s Chan said Beijing’s September unveiling of a range of measures to support the economy also encouraged many international investors to raise their stakes in China.
“Just a year ago, many international investors considered Chinese stocks uninvestable, but their view changed in September, and many of them have started to increase their investments in Hong Kong and China,” she said.
“As such, when they saw the DeepSeek breakthrough in January, these international investors had already done their homework on many Chinese stocks and found potential candidates to increase their investments.”
Chan, who just returned from meetings with investors in the US, said the trend would continue, adding that mainland investors were also increasing their investments in Hong Kong.
Mainland investors accounted for 20 per cent of daily turnover this year, up from 12 to 15 per cent last year, she said.
Read the full article: https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3303823/hong-kong-market-seen-funding-more-jaw-dropping-chinese-start-innovations
