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Millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires
MoneyWealth

China’s millionaire population grows slower than global average. Is the wealth boom over?

Global personal wealth rose at its fastest pace in nearly a decade last year, though China saw only modest gains, according to a new report

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Residential buildings in Beijing on September 15, 2025. China’s property sector, once accounting for roughly a quarter of the economy, has remained sluggish since late 2020, eroding household wealth. Photo: EPA
Themis Qi
China’s millionaire population and personal wealth levels are estimated to have grown much more slowly than the global average last year, partly owing to the sluggish property market, though wealth creation in the world’s second-largest economy is expected to continue, according to UBS, the world’s largest wealth manager.

Mainland China saw a net addition of 14,079 individuals with US$1 million or more in assets in 2025, inching up by 0.3 per cent to a total of 5.3 million, according to estimates in UBS’ latest Global Wealth Report. The Swiss bank analysed 56 markets understood to represent over 92 per cent of the world’s wealth.

UBS found that global wealth expanded for the third consecutive year in 2025, boosting the global millionaire population up by 1.5 per cent year on year to about 57.5 million people – about 2,680 per day.

The Swiss bank cited the strong performance of financial markets in most of these economies and real estate-dominated non-financial assets, in addition to currency appreciation outside the United States.

Global personal wealth expanded for the third consecutive year and grew by over 10 per cent last year, the fastest since 2017. But personal wealth in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan increased by only 4.6 per cent year on year, lagging the global average.

Home prices in mainland China fell by a further 4.1 per cent in 2025 from a year earlier, offsetting robust stock markets driven by renewed enthusiasm in the tech sector. The mainland’s CSI 300 Index jumped 18 per cent while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index soared 28 per cent.

However, the UBS findings on affluent Chinese were also affected by currency effects and insufficient access to wealth data there, said James Mazeau, an economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, in a media briefing on Tuesday.
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