Is this it? part II

Investors in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese stocks have been waiting a long time for the market to stop falling. In April we saw the beginnings of a tentative rebound, spurred by the announcement of shareholder-friendly reforms by the China Securities Regulatory Commission and positive macro / earnings headlines, but hopes were dashed soon after as the rally lost steam. ... more

Engagement and activism may rebound

We looked at the Factset SharkWatch database, which tracks global activism campaigns for the last ten years. The dataset initially covered only US campaigns but in recent years has improved its non-US coverage to the extent that we believe it now provides meaningful statistics for Asia-Pacific.

The primary observation is that, while global activism has already started to rebound from the depths of the pandemic – rising 5.2% since 2020 – this growth has all been driven by campaigns outside Asia-Pacific. Figure 1 shows how Asia-Pacific activism (which accounts for around 17% of the total) is still down by 37% compared to 2020, even as the rest of the world has risen 13.7% (note that we considered only campaigns announced in January to May of each year, to make the results comparable across years). ... more