'Hong Kong an attractive place for family offices'
Accounting firm Deloitte said on Monday it is confident that the SAR will easily achieve its goal of attracting at least 200 family offices by the end of 2025. Deloitte China’s vice chair Patrick Yip noted that there has been growing interest in family offices – or private wealth management companies for the very wealthy – since Hong Kong introduced tax waivers for the sector last year. He noted that about 30 family offices have signed deals with their department alone. “Some of them are local ones with ‘old money’, meaning they are Hong Kong families, some of these are new Hong Kong families from mainland China or Southeast Asia. Most of them are ethnic Chinese,” said Yip, adding that there are also some from the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Yip's remarks came after the firm published a study which estimated there to be 2,703 single-family offices in the SAR as of December last year. He pointed out that the estimate was quite “conservative”, as it did not include multi-family offices, nor did it count those which are from overseas but have also invested in the territory. “The actual total number of family offices in Hong Kong could be much higher,” Yip said of the results of the report, which was conducted in collaboration with the government’s FamilyOfficeHK. Yip added that he believes the official target of attracting at least 200 new family offices by the end of next year could be achieved much earlier. Authorities had said there were over 12,500 ultra high net-worth individuals in the city as of the end of 2022, and total wealth managed in the territory had reached HK$30.5 trillion.