Yan Junjie, chief executive officer of MiniMax Group Inc., right, and Yun Yeyi, chief operating officer, during the company’s listing ceremony at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Jan. 9. MiniMax, one of China’s largest generative AI startups, rose in Hong Kong after an IPO that raised $619 million and minted Yan as a new billionaire. Photographer: Lam Yik/Bloomberg
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Stock markets in Hong Kong and mainland China have had a strong run in the past 12 months. Hong Kong’s main Hang Seng Index has gained 37% and China’s benchmark CSI 300 is up by almost a quarter. With equities so strong at home, what will likely be some of the top wealth trends among Greater China’s richest in the coming year?
To learn more, I exchanged this month by email with Eva Lee, head of Greater China Equities at the UBS Global Wealth Management Chief Investment Office in Hong Kong. Lee is a spokesperson for the UBS annual “Billionaire Ambitions Report” published in December that surveys global trends in billionaire wealth.
One key regional theme from in 2025 that’s likely to continue this year is the boom in technology stocks. The rise of Greater China technology shares this year “is clearly related to the comeback of China’s tech sector since early 2025,” Lee said. It’s also part of a global fervor in large part related to the adaption of AI.
“We believe the trend is likely to continue into 2026” for mainland entrepreneurs, Lee said. New mainland Chinese tech billionaires that emerged just this month alone include MiniMax Chairman Yan Junjie and Zhipu Chairman Liu Debing.
Although mainland China far exceeds Hong Kong when it came to its number of individual billionaires, Hong Kong leads in generational transfers in wealth – another trend likely to continue this year, Lee said.
The reason? Demographics. “Mainland billionaires are younger in age and hence the potential transferable wealth in the next 15 years is smaller in amount” compared with Hong Kong’s, Lee said. “Mainland China billionaires are mainly self-made (and) accounted for 98% of total (number of its billionaires), the highest among all the key regions. In other words, the surveyed billionaires are holding the first generation of wealth,” she said.
Mainland’s billionaires as a group are younger because government economic reforms that unleashed the country’s private sector and triggered a historic wave of entrepreneurism only took off in the 1980s; Hong Kong’s success as a global business hub dates further back to its days as a British colony that ended in 1997.
Underscoring the relatively high age of some of its richest, Hong Kong year lost one of its most best-known billionaires, former Henderson Land Chairman Lee Shau Kee, who died at age 97. In 2024, Hong Kong billionaire Lui Che Woo, founder of K. Wah and Galaxy Entertainment, passed away at age 95. Li Ka-shing, senior advisor to CK Hutchison Holding and long-time Hong Kong business icon, is 97 years old. Although mainland China lost Wahaha beverage billionaire Zong Qinghou at age 79 last year, its richest man on the 2025 Forbes Billionaires List, Zhang Yiming, was a spry 41 years of age when the ranking was published last spring.
Generational wealth transfers, healthy returns in tech investments and new purchases of metals will be likely trends in Greater China wealth this year, says Eve Lee, head of Greater China Equities at the UBS Global Wealth Management Chief Investment Office in Hong Kong.
UBS
A big transfer of wealth across generations is unfolding not only in Greater China but globally, according to UBS. In 2025, 91 heirs — 64 male and 27 female — inherited a record $297.8 billion, the company said. That’s 36% more than in 2024, despite fewer people inheriting overall, it noted. “Globally, inheritance bolstered the number of multigenerational billionaires, with some 860 multi-generational billionaires now overseeing total assets of $4.7 trillion. That’s up from 805 with $4.2 trillion in 2024,” UBS said.
Looking ahead, “the next few decades will see growing numbers of billionaires and centi-millionaires as the Great Wealth Transfer continues to accelerate,” UBS wrote. Billionaires are estimated to transfer approximately $6.9 trillion of wealth globally by 2040, with at least $5.9 trillion set to be passed to children – either directly or indirectly through spouses, it said.
And internationally, multi-generational billionaires are slowly extending downward following transfers of wealth, with the number of second-generation billionaires growing by 4.6% in the 2025 UBS report, the number of third generation by 12.3%, and the number of fourth generation and beyond by 10%, UBS noted.
Looking more broadly at the wealth outlook in the Asia-Pacific region in the next 12 months, Lee sees investment interests beyond tech. “Among the APAC billionaires, their investment intention for the next 12 months is in hedge funds, followed by equities (developed markets), followed by precious metals,” she said. Just today, Chinese buyers sent three-month copper prices up by 11% to an all-time year high, according to Reuters report.
The UBS “Billionaire Ambitions Report” focuses on that elite group’s wealth and ambitions what it describes as an “era of historic wealth generation, business innovation and impact philanthropy.” UBS surveyed online 87 of the firm’s billionaire clients booked in Switzerland, the rest of Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the U.S. between July 10 and September 25 last year. In-depth interviews followed in September and October. The report also tapped a UBS/PwC database.
