Chinese securities firms are quickly catching up with the international bulge bracket investment banks brackets in the local market. Local firms dominated the league table in terms of revenue for the first half of 2015 – taking 9 positions in the top 10.
Are the boom times for the banks being passed on to their employees? We trawled through the 2014 full-year results of seven Chinese securities firms that are listed on Hong Kong stock market to find out the average pay per head.
Not surprisingly, CITIC ranks top, with its employees earning 716,420 RMB (about $111.7k) a year on average. It is already China’s largest securities firm in terms of total assets and some other indicators. And it’s the top earning investment bank for the first half of the year too. There are even media reports referring to it as China’s Goldman Sachs. Well, maybe.
Haitong Securities comes second, with an average of 553,500 RMB (about $86k). Since the start of this year, it’s made no efforts to conceal its ambition to further expand its international business. That should mean more global hires.
Two other firms on the list, GF Securities and Huatai Securities, both just listed in Hong Kong not long ago, and both have expressed a desire to expand as well. Huatai’s newly-appointed head of research Dr. Ting Lu even turned to the popular social media wechat to send out job ads as soon as Huatai listed. The average pay for Huatai’s employees is not very high on the list, and it is down to Huatai’s management to turn more hires into more revenue’s per head.
Central China Securities – the lowest in our analysis – pays its staff an average of 177,650 RMB (about $27.7k).
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