The city’s median home price has almost tripled since 1994, firmly establishing Hong Kong as the world’s least affordable urban centre several years running. Mainland Chinese buyers became ever more visible in the top end of Hong Kong’s office and residential markets. More firms were driven out of Central by sky-high rents, decamping to Quarry Bay, Kowloon or other areas, in a process dubbed de-Centralisation. Causeway Bay’s Russell Street went from obscurity to become the world’s priciest retail high street for several years until the Covid-pandemic.
Even the process of gathering data for real estate reports changed. “When we [reported about] developers’ plans to convert industrial land into residential development, we [needed] strong relationships with the Town Planning Board to obtain the information,” she said. “Nowadays, the data has become much easier [to access] via government websites.”
Peggy Sito with two awards at the 4th Business Journalism Awards of the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong on May 4th, 2020. Photo: Robert Ng
Change was even more palpable for Enoch Yiu in her coverage of banking and finance, another pillar of Hong Kong’s economy. The stock market’s value soared ninefold to HK$32.1 trillion (US$4 trillion) in September this year from the day she joined in December 1996, while the average daily market turnover ballooned 21 times to HK$109.7 billion.
During the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, Hong Kong’s de facto central bank poured HK$118 billion into the currency market to defend the local dollar’s peg against the US dollar. The two-week battle was the “most memorable reporting experience, and one of the most exciting time for me as a business reporter,” Yiu said.
South China Morning Post journalist Enoch Yiu won the 4th Business Journalism Awards of the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong on 4 May 2020. Photo: Robert Ng
Joseph Yam Chi-kwong, who led the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s battle against short-sellers said he was going to “hurt them, hit them where it hurts,” Yiu recalled.
Shortly after the currency battle, then Financial Secretary Donald Yam Yam-kuen announced in February 1999 that the city’s stock exchange, futures exchange and three different clearing houses would merge to become the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX).
The merger “ended the day of the exchange as a private club for brokers,” as described by former regulator Anthony Neoh, and was “a major step in turning Hong Kong into a leading fundraising centre,” she said.
More changes would come. The exchange’s trading hall closed for good in 2017, when all transactions were moved online. That story also won the Hong Kong News Awards that year.
The profile of Hong Kong’s market changed. From Tsingtao Brewery’s 1983 listing of the so-called H-shares, mainland Chinese companies would now make up 80 per cent of the exchange’s turnover.
Still, some quirks remained. Hong Kong halts stock trading whenever typhoons – rated 8 or higher – approach the city, even if most transactions now occur digitally. It’s a quirk that the exchange’s CEO has been struggling to change.
Wader Securities’ CEO Tammy Shu Yee-nar (Left) and Shu Yee-har (Right), who owned Hong Kong’s smallest brokerage firm, on the final day of the local stock exchange’s trading floor before it shut for good on October 19, 2017. Photo: K. Y.
And short-sellers are as obsessed with driving a wedge into the city’s currency peg today as they were in 1998 when Yiu witnessed the HKMA’s battle.
Hong Kong’s role also changed in energy, as witnessed by Eric Ng, who joined the Post in March 1998 as a freelancer. His first job was to translate the daily coverage of Chinese-language newspapers into English for the Post’s predominantly expatriate business editors.
His first reporting assignment was the annual meeting of Tomorrow International Holdings, a small electronics distributor that transformed itself into a property developer called Talent Property Group 13 years later.
The change, reflected in the changes in business focus and shareholders, was “typical of many small-cap companies,” Ng said.
Eric Ng’s very first news report for South China Morning Post on 13 June1998, a four-paragraph story about Tomorrow International Holdings, taken over and renamed Talent Property Group 15 years later. Photo: SCMP Archive
Ng was assigned to cover energy in 2000, as China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) prepared to raise capital through a Hong Kong IPO. That was followed by PetroChina two months later, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) in 2001.
The listing of the three oil giants, dubbed the “three barrels of oil” by the Chinese media necessitated an energy beat in Hong Kong.
“Unlike the [real-time news agencies], we did not have to report on energy trade data as our readers were mostly retail stock investors,” Ng said. “Hong Kong trailed Singapore in the development of oil and gas related manufacturing and trading, as we do not have industrial parks for oil refining, chemicals production and trading.”
Eric Ng moderated the South China Morning Post’s China Conference: Southeast Asia in Singapore on 29 March 2023. Photo: SCMP
The Post kept its energy coverage in print until its new owner Alibaba Group Holding began a digitalisation drive after its 2015 purchase of one of Asia’s oldest English-language newspapers. Helped by insights into readers’ reception of online stories, the Post pivoted Ng’s coverage towards climate change and ESG in 2020.
Ten years earlier, Ng ventured to Zibo city in Shandong province to investigate claims that Dongyue Group was overproducing ozone-depleting refrigerant gases, and then destroying them to earn carbon credits to resell.
It was “my most challenging and memorable assignment,” he recalled. “I left the interview in a hurry with a moderate dose of fear of potential reprisal.”
Dongyue was banned from selling HFC-23 carbon credits after 2013. Ng’s confrontation with the company’s co-founder Cui Tongzheng and his story of the reporting trip won him the 2010 Citi Journalistic Excellence Award and a citation by the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong.
The Post’s pivot from energy coverage to ESG focus mirrored Hong Kong’s expansion from a financial centre to a ESG hub, where “some brokerage analysts now also cover ESG”, while others “changed their titles to reflect the trend,” he said. HSBC’s former regional head of utilities is now called Head of Energy Transition (Asia-Pacific).
Technology coverage also changed over the years. Bien Perez joined the Post in May 2000 as the deputy editor of a weekly technology pull-out section. The crash of the dotcom companies at the turn of the millennium decimated print advertising, causing what remained of the technology team to be absorbed into the business section in 2001.
Perez’s 2007 feature about a scramble to restore Hong Kong’s telecommunications links after a Taiwan earthquake won him a Hong Kong News Awards citation the following year. In the two decades since, the focus of Hong Kong’s technology coverage shifted from gadgets and networks to internet applications and their operators, most of them based on the mainland.
Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent Holdings and scores of internet-based businesses have transformed the local stock market’s composition, and altered the media’s technology coverage.
Lenovo Group surpassed old personal computer stalwarts like IBM, HP and Dell to become the industry leader. Despite US sanctions, Huawei Technologies and ZTE remain among the world’s major suppliers of telecoms network equipment. Huawei also has remained relevant in smartphones along with Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.
Artificial intelligence is an area where Chinese start-ups and stalwarts like SenseTime look to create new breakthroughs and step up mainstream adoption of applications based on the technology.
“The rapid development of the internet, social media and 24/7 news coverage have made it more challenging to cover breaking news and write in-depth analyses of hot topics like AI and the impact of geopolitical tensions on China’s tech development,” Perez said.
Bien Perez (left) in action during a Redefining Hong Kong Debate Series on 21 April 2017. Photo: Jonathan Wong
Still, those same challenges also helped expand the sources of credible information and analyses that the SCMP’s tech desk can tap into.
The Post’s Digital First initiative helped to “sharpen the newsroom’s capabilities in determining how and which stories to cover, follow-up or investigate,” he said. “This now involves more targeted use of videos, podcasts, photos, graphics and illustrations.”
With technology blossoming into multiple areas, are there major misses for Hong Kong?
The biggest misses involve cybersecurity, Perez said. “Most companies spend more on Christmas decorations than on securing their computing and communications networks,” he said, citing an old source. “The recent breach at tech hub Cyberport shows how vulnerable the city’s infrastructure has become to increasingly sophisticated hacking activities.”
Fully developing the city’s potential in tech research and development and tech-related financing will need the active participation of enterprises in the Greater Bay Area. But some regulatory restrictions must be adjusted to reflect the commitment to enhance the city’s role as part of the GBA. Hopefully, current geopolitical tensions will also ease sooner than later to help drive increased tech activity in Hong Kong.
“Clear and consistent regulation of fintech and Web3 is a must for enterprises involved in these fields to thrive in Hong Kong,” he said. “ Improved investor education initiatives are also necessary for more people to understand how to steer clear of potential fraudulent activities, like what happened to FTX and JPEX.”
