BEIJING, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- China's public offering fund sector has maintained a stable development trend in recent years, with further measures set to boost the development of this sector in 2025, an official said at a press conference on Thursday, while detailing enhanced support for the A-share market.

Assets under the management of China's public offering funds rose to 33 trillion yuan (about 4.6 trillion U.S. dollars) by the end of 2024 from 13 trillion yuan in 2019, according to Wu Qing, chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

In 2025, the sales fees of public offering funds would be further slashed, saving a total of 45 billion yuan annually for investors, Wu told the press conference held by the State Council Information Office.

Chinese financial authorities unveiled a plan on Wednesday outlining measures to encourage medium- and long-term funds move into the capital market to further stabilize stock performance, with Wu elaborating at the press conference that public offering funds would increase their A-share holdings of circulating market capitalization by at least 10 percent annually over the next three years.

Wu said that efforts are being made to ensure large state-owned insurance companies allocate 30 percent of their newly added annual premium incomes to invest in A-shares starting in 2025, which is expected to inject hundreds of billions of yuan of long-term capital into the A-share market each year.

The second batch of pilot programs for long-term stock market investment from insurance funds will be implemented in the first half of 2025, with a minimum scale of 100 billion yuan, gradually expanding thereafter, Wu added.

The number of qualified foreign institutional investors had expanded to 866 by the end of 2024, and their investment in China's A-share market stood at about 3 trillion yuan in total, Wu told the press conference, adding that foreign capital is one of the important capital sources of the A-share market.

Zou Lan, an official with the People's Bank of China, the central bank, said at the press conference that the central bank had created two policy tools to support the stable development of the stock market, namely a swap program for securities, funds and insurance companies to obtain liquidity from the central bank through asset collateralization, and a special re-lending facility to guide banks to provide loans to listed companies and their major shareholders for buybacks and increasing shareholdings.

The initial scale of the swap program of 50 billion yuan in October last year was used for investment in the stock market, and the second batch of 55 billion yuan operated earlier this month can be used for the same purpose at any time, Zou said.

Currently, the amount of insurance funds invested in stocks and equity funds has exceeded 4.4 trillion yuan, Xiao Yuanqi, deputy head of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, said at the press conference.

Vice Minister of Finance Liao Min told the press conference that implementing long-term performance assessments for state-owned commercial insurance companies is an important measure for promoting these companies' use of capital markets for medium- to long-term investments. Enditem

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