China’s qualified foreign institutional investor scheme (QFII) and its renminbi equivalent (RQFII) allow foreign institutional investors to invest in onshore Chinese assets, within allocated quotas.
Investec Asset Management received an additional RMB 3.5bn ($560m) in RQFII quota and now has a total of RMB 4.5bn.
The firm also has a QFII quota of $100m.
The firm follows global asset management firms such as UBS Asset Management, Blackrock and Aberdeen Standard Investments, which have significantly increased their RQFII quotas. Blackrock and Aberdeen Standard are now among the largest RQFII quota holders.
Under the QFII scheme, Taiwan-based Mega International Investment Trust received an additional $200m in QFII quota and now has a total of $380m.
Mega International manages 36 funds in Taiwan with NT$92.74bn ($3.18bn) in assets, according to data from Taiwan’s Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Association. Excluding the firm’s money-market product, the Mega China A Share Equity Fund is the firm’s biggest fund, with NT$7.52bn in assets.
Since the quota programmes began, SAFE has awarded at total of RMB 615.36bn in RQFII quotas to 196 holders and $99.36bn of QFII quotas to 286 licence holders, according to the agency’s data.
In total, there are 223 RQFII licence holders and 309 QFII licence holders, according to data from the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
RQFII and QFII bring capital into China. By comparison, the qualified domestic institutional investor (QDII) scheme is a channel for onshore investors to invest offshore.
However, SAFE stopped issuing QDII quota in March 2015 due to concern over capital outflows and the subsequent effect on the RMB currency
