Chairman's Speech
Lewis Wan
The Chairman of HKFAEx Group
Hong Kong Financial Asset Exchange Group, HKFAEx Group, mandates to become the world's leading online trading and clearing platform for financial assets. We are committed to building a convenient, transparent, fair and equitable circulation channel for physical assets, including global arts, tea, wines & spirits, speciality agricultural products, precious and rare metals, bulk commodities and other tradable collectibles, making them essential parts of asset allocation.
The Group anchors in super-connected Hong Kong, leveraging Mainland China and engaging the world, to provide global investors with diversified investment asset classes and channels to enhance investment return in a risk-adjusted manner.
HKFAEx Group has been unswervingly moving forward in the three core directions aims to the great goal since its inception.
Platform Economy: A new way of efficiently matching market demand and supply is introduced. The market is optimized through exploit all market stakeholder's advantages and incorporate them into a single platform.
Connectivity: Our services align with the concept of the global village, providing the connectivity of various financial assets, transactions across different regions and countries.
Serving the Real Economy: Serving the real economy does not only create value to the society, but it also provides a solid foundation for our long-term sustainable development.
After having clear goals and directions, HKFAEx Group works hard to achieve them. We take China's commodity trading market as the starting point, hoping to solve three problems to break the bottleneck that hinders its development.
Information Asymmetry: China's commodity trading market is still in a relatively closed market environment. Deficiencies in information circulation seriously hinder the foundation of the commodity circulation and the connectivity between China's commodity trading market and the international market. Through strategic cooperation with domestic and foreign research institutions and software developers, we jointly develop information release platform to make market information more transparent, supply and demand docking more smooth as well as more efficient commodity circulation. We believe this platform laid a solid foundation for connection with the international commodity market.
Lacking in economic scale: Currently, China's commodity circulation and trading system are still in disorder, separation with the international markets, disconnection of online and offline markets, segmentation of futures & spot markets, and the uneven development of regional urban and rural markets. These have caused China's commodity trading market labelled as small, scattered and chaotic by international industrial participants. On one hand, we can consolidate the scope of services in the commodity trading market by uniting the leading enterprises to form an alliance to share transaction, capital and logistics information. On the other hand, we will build an integrated servicing system for commodity spot market. We aim to broaden the scope of services and to drive the industry towards standardization. When we can “Connect China”, “Be Global” follows naturally.
Inadequate Discourse Power: China is both the world's largest supplier of commodities and the most significant demand ingest, but it is in a weak position at both sides of supply and demand. Internationalization may rectify this situation. At this point, we need to integrate Chinese domestic supply and demand with foreign. On the one hand, we build a platform in Hong Kong to integrate domestic commodity trading resources and to attract foreign capital participation. On the other hand, we carry out the trading model and service model innovation to provide more competitive and value-added products for the participants in the demand and supply chain, and to better serve their needs. We believe when our platform is satisfying the domestic and foreign needs, this will facilitate the connectivity of China's commodity trading market with the world.
By solving the above three problems, not only setting a new path for China's commodity trading industry but also accumulating three significant elements for our development, i.e. information, products and platforms. The entire commodity trading and circulation will be more transparent, more diversified and more convenient. The value generated by an inherently large in scale and efficient commodities market will increase geometrically once formed an efficient circulation channel. This dynamic ecosystem not only reduce costs in transaction, financing and servicing, and operational risks, but also attract more different types of participants to increase the breadth and depth of the market. These will become an essential foundation and valuable resource for the HKFAEx Group's long-term stable development.
As the founder of HKFAEx Group, I believe HKFAEx Group is capable of becoming a disruptor in China's commodity trading industry with great success. My self-confidence originated from three aspects. Firstly, we leverage on government policy. Our starting point is consistent with China's economic reform, open-market policy and the rapid development of the internet. Secondly, we have been investing in the industry for many years with good experience. We have a good understanding of the industry and strong supports from government agencies, industry associations, and peers in Mainland China. Thirdly, we are rich in resources, with the experienced and professional management and consultant team and comprehensive social connection. In short, my self-confidence builds up naturally because we are doing at the right time, right place with the right human resources.
The year 2019 was a milestone for the Group. The reorganization of the exchange business under the Group was completed, successfully stepping into the international capital markets. This enhanced our brand influence, strengthened our financial power, and laid a solid foundation for subsequent healthy and rapid development.
Finally, to summarise, the commodity trading industry is only a starting point for HKFAEx Group. Our business has just begun, and our visions are still farther away. We sincerely hope to cooperate with fellow practitioners who are interested in realizing the connectivity between China and the international financial asset market, so as to build a global connected financial asset exchange.