The Foreign Correspondents’ Club hosted a high-level panel on Hong Kong’s capital markets revival and HKEX’s most significant listing reforms in a decade moderated by Richard Winter, Senior Advisor of Quam Plus International Financial Limited
Paul Malam, Head of Policy at HKEX, opened the session with a snapshot of the market turnaround. He recalled the 2023 slump with falling market cap and low listings, then highlighted the strong rebound from early 2025 driven by Chinese tech and the DeepSeek AI moment. Hong Kong listed 119 companies in 2025 and added 48 more by April 2026, with a record 476 IPO applications in the pipeline. He noted sponsor staffing pressures and the joint SFC-HKEX push for better documentation quality.
Julia Charlton, Founder of Charltons, provided a detailed breakdown of the March 2026 consultation paper. She described proposals to halve WVR market cap thresholds, raise the voting ratio cap to 20:1, introduce dual innovation pathways, lower specialist tech (Chapter 18C) barriers, enable universal confidential filings, and strengthen the return mechanism with expanded public naming of all professional parties involved in failed applications.
Dr. Renu Bhaita, former Chairman of the HKEX Listing Committee, reflected on the success of Chapter 18A, which has enabled 86 biotech listings with strong capital raising and no major failures. She emphasised evolving Chinese innovation, the need for dynamic rules, and measured liberalisation to attract quality companies while maintaining investor confidence.
The panel fielded questions on regulation versus market forces, the naming-and-shaming proposal, and support for smaller companies.