Building wealth resilience today for growth tomorrow

ASIA is wealthier than ever, but a confluence of factors including the pandemic, inflation, geopolitics and unprecedented shifts in economic patterns, has made managing that new wealth more challenging than ever.

Covid and its associated economic challenges drove many economies into recession in 2020, while rising rates and a cost-of-living crisis are triggering another slowdown in 2022. But the data show that in Asia the long-term trajectory towards greater prosperity remains unchanged. Boston Consulting Group estimated last year that Asia will generate some US$22 trillion in new wealth between 2020 and 2025, and the evidence supports the trend. Our regional wealth management operation saw robust growth in net new invested assets throughout last year and that positive momentum continued through the first half of this year despite Covid and all its associated challenges.

The new wave of Asian wealth creation differs from previous waves in two significant ways. The first is the size and speed of some of the fortunes being made. Asia is increasingly becoming one of the world’s most important nurseries for tech unicorns. Last year alone the number of Asian unicorns jumped by 25 per cent to 451, and the region attracted a third of the world’s new-economy investment. Asia’s manufacturing and trading giants took generations to build, while the fortunes of some of today’s leading tech entrepreneurs were built rapidly. These new faces of wealth are already asking how they can sustain their fortunes over generations.