The world's first fund denominated solely in patacas, launched six months ago in Macau, has this month become available to investors throughout the Greater Bay Area, the president of the management company told Lusa today.
In a review of the first half of operations in the semi-autonomous region, the head of the management company of the A&P Macau Patacas Treasury Fund, Bernardo Tavares Alves, noted that the fund reached 200 million patacas (23.9 million euros), around 1,500 investors and a gross rate of return of 3.86%.
"It was a success to be able to demonstrate not only to investors that it was possible for the pataca to have a return much higher than that available in bank deposits, and, in that sense, it was proof that we were right, [that] the pataca can be a currency of investment and not just a transactional currency", said the founder and president of A&P Sociedade Gestora de Fundos de Investimento.
It is an open-ended public fund whose investment objective is to invest in high-quality money market instruments and short-term bank deposits.
Initially aimed at the local population, it also became this month the "first public fund in Macau to be established and sold" in the Greater Bay Area, in what Bernardo Tavares Alves considers to be an "important milestone" for the development of the financial market in the semi-autonomous region.
The Greater Bay Area is a Beijing project to create a global metropolis that integrates Hong Kong, Macau and nine cities in Guangdong province (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing), a region with about 86 million inhabitants and a gross domestic product (GDP) of over one trillion euros, similar to the GDP of Australia, Indonesia or Mexico, countries that make up the G20.
Entry into this giant market is through the Southbond Wealth Management Connect program, which allows investors from that area of mainland China to access financial products in the special administrative regions of Macau and Hong Kong.
The fund is part of a package of products offered by the Bank of China, the depositary institution of the A&P Macau Patacas Treasury Fund.
The total quota is 150 billion yuan (17.9 billion euros), shared between Hong Kong and Macau, and an individual investor can use a quota of three million (358 thousand euros), explained Tavares Alves.
The official also believes that the initiative also involves "trying to understand how receptive residents of the Greater Bay Area are to the pataca and to investing in a market" like Macau.
"It's an interbank market, so it's quite safe. It seems like the right step to try to explore this new market [in Greater Bahia]," he admitted.
When the fund was launched on July 2, Bernardo Tavares Alves told Lusa that one of the objectives was to "try to redefine the capital relationship" in Macau.
"We have to develop this market, since the Government says that we have to diversify the economy and, in the financial system, this part of funds has not really been touched", he added at the time.
With an economy deeply dependent on the gaming industry, Macau authorities have targeted several sectors, including finance, to diversify public coffers' revenues.
