Minmetals International Trust
Minmetals Trust’s wealth management arm serves tens of thousands of high net-worth individuals and corporate clients, providing asset allocation across all markets through its flagship Heng Xin product line, which offers underlying assets ranging from infrastructure projects to supply chain finance.
The firm, majority-owned by state-owned enterprise China Minmetals Corp, hired He Fei from Ping An Trust to run its wealth management division in 2019. It expanded its presence in China to cover a total of 22 cities in 2019, with a team of 350 wealth managers, over two thirds of whom were new hires.
At the same time, Minmetals was well aware of the limitations of focusing only on expanding on the ground. That prompted it to invest in developing an online platform to attract new customers and maintain existing ones, upgrading its system and opening a VIP account for its clients in 2019.
Those efforts meant Minmetals was able to considerably outgrow its Chinese peers.
In the retail market, the sales volume for Minmetals’ wealth management products reached Rmb47.5 billion ($6.7 billion) in 2019 – 3.6 times what was recorded a year ago. The number of clients increased 270%.
In particular, the number of clients with at least Rmb10 million of trust assets more than quadrupled, reaching almost 1,000 by the end of 2019.
The outstanding scale of the trust assets managed by Minmetals increased by nearly 48% in 2019 to reach Rmb885 billion. Its revenues were up almost 42% to Rmb4.16 billion, with a 22.3% increase in its net profits to over Rmb2.1 billion.
Minmetals’ expansion has been careful, eschewing high-yield products in exchange for a sharp focus on risk management. That has helped it keep its old clients happy while adding a few new ones.