If the KOLs (key opinion leaders) have stormed the world with livestreaming and short videos globally in recent years, the metaverse is bringing on a new cohort of KOLs across Asia – virtual influencers. In fact, Asia is already seeing very rapid growth of virtual influencers, given the high internet penetration, digital economy and demographic tailwinds across the region. From Korea, China, Japan to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, brands and marketers across industries are increasingly ready to adopt and experiment, especially those targeting young consumers. In fact according to Jing Daily estimates, of the 80% of Chinese netizens following online celebrities, over 60% follow virtual idols and over half spending at least RMB500 a month on related purchases. Virtual KOLs also are said to often have interaction rates three times higher than their real counterparts. In this article, we shall share more about this coming of age of virtual influencers in Asia, with a deeper dive into the observations in Korea where the virtual influencers are bringing important new elements to the K-pop industry.

Sichuan has a very real climate change issue to manage this year. After extreme heatwave and drought causing power rationing for industrial users for two weeks, the province is now quickly re-gearing for Level IV flood emergency alert. While most factories are able to resume production now, should we be concerned especially with memories from the power crunch actions last year? What would be the impacts and ripple effects we should pay attention to? In this article we reviewed the background triggering the Sichuan situation, and why we believe the power rationing events are more pre-emptive in nature and energy security is very carefully managed in the planned economy of China.

Global markets have been subject to higher volatility so far in 2022 amid escalating inflation and recession risks. The US rate hike cycle has added further pressure to the dollar return of most foreign-currency-denominated assets due to the strengthening dollar. In this article, we describe the genesis behind the recent addition of USD hedged unit class to our Premia China Treasury and Policy Bank Bond Long Duration ETF (9177.HK), which is the first among peers to offer USD hedging feature in Asia. For investors that are mindful of mark to market risk amid continued US interest rate hikes, as well asset owners with long duration allocation needs, the Premia China Treasury and Policy Bank Bond Long Duration ETF is a unique tool that provides access to the long duration Chinese government and policy bank bonds with strong A1 sovereign bond rating, competitive yield of over 3%, stable yield volatility and now with the USD hedged unit class, additional optionality to capture the steady yield of China sovereign bonds whilst minimizing exchange rate risks for RMB.

Notwithstanding the cautious sentiment towards Chinese equities over the past year, the fundamentals suggest that it would be increasingly difficult to ignore Chinese equities as its economic heft and importance continues to grow. In this article, our Senior Advisor Say Boon Lim analyzes the fundamentals of the Chinese economy and why it makes sense for global allocators to deploy Chinese equities for diversification and growth opportunities as the alternative would be a deliberate underweight decision for a large part of the world's GDP and the key driver for global productivity growth.

After lithium, coal and pork, polysilicon appears to be the next in line for potential government price interventions. In fact, polysilicon prices which have been on nine consecutive weeks of spiking spree, have reached 10-year high and the high prices have caused severe supply chain disruptions and suppressed domestic demand for solar panels – and in the process slow down the solar infrastructure build out in China. Such price intervention thus is envisaged to be a positive regulating event, that would shift the industry dynamics from upstream biased to more midstream and downstream actors, to rebalance the supply chain economics for long run sustainable growth of the industry ecosystem. In this article, we shall analyze this in greater details, and explain why despite the headline concerns it would be a positive event for the sector leaders including related constituents in the Premia ETFs, while the polysilicon market is expected to remain tight throughout the year due to persistent strong global demand and supply shortages.