The Hedge Fund Association (HFA) has appointed Adam J. Steinberg, a financial communications consultant in Beijing, as the new director of its China chapter.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Steinberg advises companies on communications issues that affect reputation and market valuation. He has more than eight years of experience in mainland China and most recently worked at Hill+Knowlton Strategies in Beijing. He holds an MBA from CKGSB in Beijing.
We are thrilled to have such an accomplished person as Adam joining the HFA as a regional director, says Mitch Ackles, president of the HFA. Globally, hedge funds are moving into the investment mainstream, and he will be an excellent representative of both the industry and the HFA.
Ackles cites the growing importance of hedge funds invested in China as the HFAs incentive to appoint a new director. Beyond its economic growth, China has grown very quickly in terms of its level of investment sophistication, and hedge funds are a part of that, he says. PerTrac, an aggregator of global hedge fund data, found 658 hedge funds reporting in China as of April, 2012, about half of which were formed since January 2010.
Hedge funds are still very new in China, and the HFA is in an excellent position to support both domestic Chinese hedge funds and global funds that have opened representative offices in China, but are still waiting for Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) licenses, says Steinberg.
The Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor program, launched in 2002, allows licensed foreign investors to buy and sell yuan-denominated A shares in China’s mainland stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen that had previously been closed off to foreign investors.
(CG)