Asian Investment Conference: first UBS-hosted edition kicks off in Hong Kong with ‘global investor mindset’ on agenda
- Former US secretary of state John Kerry and Thailand’s prime minister Srettha Thavisin are among the speakers and 3,000 attendees
- UBS continues the flagship conference started 27 years ago by Credit Suisse, following the merger of the rival banks in June 2023
Former US secretary of state John Kerry and Thailand’s prime minister Srettha Thavisin are among the speakers and 3,000 attendees expected in Hong Kong this week for the Asian Investment Conference (AIC) presented by UBS.
The Swiss investment bank kicked off “the biggest global investor conference in Hong Kong” on Monday, Niall MacLeod, the curator of the week-long AIC, said in an interview. The event includes a two-day conference to be held on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Four Seasons Hotel.
“It has been such an important part of the global investor mindset, to come to this conference to learn about the region,” said MacLeod, head of product management at UBS. “We’re very proud of it being in Hong Kong. We’re very proud of the tradition of it.”
The event targets the bank’s institutional clients, hosting more than 3,000 registered attendees, including representatives from more than 300 companies from 15 markets in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America. The agenda, with 100 speakers and 50 panel discussions, will shed light on the “top-down” and “bottom-up” topics on investors’ minds, according to MacLeod.
These include macro and big-picture topics such as interest rates, climate, and geopolitics, as well as micro content like generative artificial intelligence, neuroscience developments on the mind and longevity, the future of cities and succession.
“All these things coming together are essentially the way that institutional investors think,” MacLeod said.
MacLeod said the bank never considered moving the AIC. “Hong Kong is Asia’s world city,” he said. “This is still the premier place that people want to come to debate the issues in the world within this region.”
The change was “client-centric”, MacLeod said. “If you look through the calendar of companies reporting, what is the time of year that you can get the maximum number of companies to come to a conference to present to our institutional clients? I say the end of May is a much, much better time than the end of March.”
The AIC will also feature Nobel Economics laureate Paul Romer, Megan Smith, former chief technology officer in the Obama administration, and Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
