Huge room for growth in index fund market

The market for index funds in China has immense room for development and more innovation is needed to promote its growth, industry leaders and experts said on Thursday.

Against the backdrop of an overall sluggish capital market, the scale of index funds is growing, especially for the exchange-traded funds, which are seeing the creation of records, said Ma Xiaodong, vice-president of Tencent Financial Technology.

"The index fund has huge room for development as it only took up about 4 percent of the 13.16 trillion yuan ($1.89 trillion) public fund market in the third quarter of this year," Ma told the Global Index Fund Forum, organized by Tencent and held in Shenzhen on Thursday.

Zhao Yonggang, deputy director of the research and development department at China Securities Index, said compared with the United States, index fund investment in China is much quicker.

In around 10 years' time, the country has already developed a comprehensive range of products in the main categories, he said.

The industry needs to make innovation the next step, and further diversification and smarter products will be the trend, Zhao noted.

As of the end of the third quarter this year, the index fund market had amounted to 538.25 billion yuan, growing 10 percent over the previous quarter.