Hong Kong is starting a program next year to give residency to people who invest HK$30 million (US$3.8 million) in the territory as it steps up efforts to revive its status as a financial center and bolster revenue.
The plan, scheduled to start in the middle of next year, includes a mandatory HK$3 million investment into a portfolio run by Hong Kong Investment Corp to support local technology and innovation. Other eligible assets include stocks, debt securities and funds. Industrial and commercial real estate are capped at HK$10 million. Residential real estate is excluded.
The move is expected to bring in HK$120 billion annually, Hong Kong Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui (許正宇) said on Tuesday.
Photo: Bloomberg
He said he estimates that 4,000 people could participate per year.
It is the latest move to attract talent and capital as the territory is facing fierce competition from peers including Singapore. In addition to population outflow amid political clampdowns, Hong Kong is also seeing dwindling revenue from land sales due to a slump in the property market.
Known as the Capital Investment Entrant Scheme, the plan was announced during Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee’s (李家超) policy address in October.
The scheme was previously implemented in 2003 to stimulate economic growth, before being halted in 2015. The relaunch underscores how the years-long COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic slowdown are prompting the Hong Kong government to seek new avenues of growth.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing