John Ford

Fidelity is building a team of investment specialists in mainland China, its second for the Asia-Pacific region.

John Ford, Fidelity’s Asia-Pacific CIO, said the 10- to 15-person team would support the manager’s bottom-up, fundamental analysts by providing general market research and analytics.

They would support the manager’s research office in Shanghai, which was staffed with frontline investment analysts, he said.

Fidelity already staffed a team of a 15 investment specialists in Delhi, Ford said, who in addition to investment research provided the manager with Indian-language speakers who are also fluent in English.

By locating the China team in the far northern city of Dalian, situated on the coast of the Yellow Sea and close to Japan and the Korean peninsula, the manager aimed to tap into similar linguistic abilities.

“There are a lot of Korean and Japanese speakers up there. Just as we have investment specialists in Delhi who can speak English, we can have Chinese who can speak Japanese and Korean,” Ford said.

Meantime, Fidelity recently made its first direct investment into the China A-Shares market, after gaining a US$150 million Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor licence in late 2010.