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Source: Hard-Core Ladyboss

Recently, listed companies have started disclosing last year’s annual reports. Many public funds also have listed company shareholders, so you can also take a look at how these public funds are doing.

Below are some of the statistics from the Fund Daily:

At the moment, the disclosed information on current operations is still not complete, but the table’s information content is also quite substantial.

Come on—let’s all take a bite of the “money-making” gossip about public funds.

1. Large scale ≠ high profit—better to quietly get rich

The first little shock this table gave me was:

Large scale ≠ high profit—still, it’s best to quietly get rich!

Look at Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin Fund—low profile, no fanfare—yet it turns out to be the hidden profit champion among them. Although it didn’t disclose revenue data, its net profit is 3.007 billion yuan, already far surpassing China 华夏 and Fortune 富国.

Let’s have some “gossip-eating audience” analysis the reasons:

First, Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin’s business has high profitability efficiency. Most likely, stable profits are contributed by fee-light but large-scale businesses such as fixed income and pension businesses.

As everyone probably knows, Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin Fund is one of the few asset management institutions in the industry that holds full licenses for pension businesses. Besides public funds, they also have non-public businesses such as private placements, social security, annuities, and pensions. The scale in this area is also very large—accounting for more than half of its total managed scale, absolutely a true “keystone.”

Before the New Year, Ouyang Kai stepped down from all public fund products and went to manage non-public businesses instead—also something that can be viewed as a resource allocation issue.

Second, Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin has low costs. After all, its compensation is famously a “floor price” in the industry.

Third, compared with competitors—such as China 华夏, which is also based in Beijing. China 华夏’s public fund management scale is twice that of Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin. Yet its net profit is still worse than Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin. This may also indicate that ETF business really is too cash-consuming.

This账—Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin probably calculated it pretty clearly.

But ETF is a major trend, and you can’t completely avoid it. So what did Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin think of? They launched actively managed ETFs!

Their first ETF is the CSI 300 Quality ETF.

The logic behind this index construction is: based on ROE, go one step further by including the listed companies’ earnings stability and earnings quality into the evaluation at the same time. From the constituent stocks of the CSI 300 Index, they select 50 real “profit top students.”

Industrial and Commercial Rui Xin has actually seen quite a few fund managers leave recently, but I think their strategic resolve is still strong—they’ve kept insisting on actively managed equity. The only potential “BUG” is that their research and investment team is still a bit too old money, and the overall environment is still somewhat closed off.

Look at the neighbor, E Fund 易方达. In the past, it was almost all internal cultivation, but in the past year, how many people have they brought in… And the brought-in fund managers are starting to get to work one after another. (Fund manager changes—today it’s already on Hard-Core Ladyboss’s nonstop chatter about E Fund. Another big shot has left. 华安基金)

3. Why can the Postal Savings Fund turn the tables?

But the industry also has special cases of turning around against the trend—such as the Postal Savings Fund. Compared with the data from the past few years, you could say it’s had big rises and big falls.

The Postal Savings Fund was listed on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ) in November 2015—first public fund and also the only one. In 2016, when they disclosed their first annual report, at that time Ren Zesong was still there, and the Postal Savings Fund’s net profit could still reach 375 million yuan.

Didn’t expect it—peak right at debut, and later it was all downhill. In 2024, it even fell to the bottom. Full-year net profit attributable to the parent was only a little under 6 million yuan, down over 90% year over year. It nearly fell into loss territory, and revenue also shrank sharply at the same time, with operating pressure at maximum.

Fortunately, in 2025 it successfully turned around. Full-year net profit surged to more than 53 million yuan, a nearly 3.8-fold increase year over year—basically getting out of the trough.

This reversal, on the one hand, is because the company stabilized its fixed-income+ business and retained capital by using steady-type products. Among them, Yan Yicheng contributed a lot—one of the fixed-income+ funds dug out the earliest—and finally helped bring back the Golden Bull Award.

Now Yan Yicheng’s personal managed scale also exceeds 30 billion yuan, and he has climbed into the top tier.

On the other hand, it also has to do with a big explosion in investment returns from the company’s own funds.

And on another hand, it may be due to some cost-reduction and efficiency-improvement reasons—such as reductions in things like office rent and entertainment expenses, along with some optimization to staffing.

After that, the Postal Savings Fund will also face certain challenges, such as Yan Yicheng’s capacity limits by scale and further institutional optimizations, etc. But last year’s wave still gave the Postal Savings Fund a lot of confidence.

4. Public funds’ joys and sorrows are not shared

Last year, although the A-share market warmed up, it was not sunshine everywhere for public funds. Some companies saw their net profits decline quite noticeably, including Harvest Fund 汇添富, Bank of Communications Schroder 交银施罗德, Guolian Allianz 国联安, and Shenwan 菱信, etc.

To talk about the reasons, I think there are probably a few:

First, on the cost side, in 2024 salaries were already cut once. It’s hard to cut much further than that. Also, even though the market warmed up, they still need to hire people to fill gaps. Market development and publicity expenses will increase too, so in practice total expenses may actually rise.

Second, distribution commissions and promotion fees given to banks and third-party channels only go up and never down. The money earned from revenue is taken away by costs in large part.

Third, there’s a product structure issue. If you can’t keep up with market rhythms and the existing products don’t have standout points, it’s relatively hard. Companies that rely on traditional actively managed equity products, companies that missed out on ETF, and companies that didn’t catch the fixed-income+ hot tracks from last year—all of them tend to have disappointing performance.

In summary, companies with good ETF business have an advantage, and companies with sharp actively managed equity have an advantage. Many traditional actively managed equity companies were actually redeemed by everyone more heavily last year.

At the end of the day, it’s because in the past few years the industry harmed retail investors too deeply. After the market warmed up, the first reaction for everyone was to run. In this situation, for small fund companies, don’t even talk about completing tasks of several tens of billions—just increasing a few hundred million or several hundred million more is actually extremely difficult.