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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.
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