"Stock Picking Experts" Face Midlife Crisis, How Many Good Cards Are Left for Huatai-PineBridge?

At the start of 2026, the veteran fund company Huatai-PineBridge is facing pressure from talent loss.

iFinD data shows that at the end of 2025, Huatai-PineBridge Fund Management Co., Ltd. had a total of 897 employees, and as of April 7, 2026, this number had decreased to 878. In just one quarter, the employee count dropped by nearly 20, which is a relatively rare scale of reduction among leading fund companies.

Employee attrition and management reshuffle

As early as January 2026, five core employees, including veteran investment researchers and key product backbone members, disappeared from the fund industry system. Over the following two months, more than ten others left gradually, covering multiple departments such as research and development and marketing.

Along with the grassroots attrition, there was also a major management overhaul. In July 2025, Li Wen, the founding veteran who had led the company for ten years, stepped down as chairman, and was succeeded by Lu Weiming, who previously worked at Orient Securities (600958.SH). Orient Securities holds a 47% stake in Huatai-PineBridge, making it the largest shareholder. By the end of 2024, after completing a senior management change, Lu Weiming also served as chairman of Huatai-PineBridge, which market observers saw as a signal of increased control by the shareholder over the subsidiary.

Looking back at Li Wen’s decade of leadership, Huatai-PineBridge’s public fund scale grew from less than 200 billion yuan to 929.1 billion yuan, but its industry ranking experienced rollercoaster changes, rising from 6th place in 2015 to 3rd in 2021, then falling to 9th in mid-2025.

By mid-2021, Huatai-PineBridge managed nearly one trillion yuan in funds, with non-money market fund assets under management second only to E Fund, ranking second in the industry. However, it was not until August 2025 that Huatai-PineBridge’s fund management scale first surpassed one trillion yuan, becoming the ninth fund company in the industry to reach this milestone; at that time, E Fund had already become an industry giant with over 2 trillion yuan in asset management scale, with a clear gap between the two. According to Orient Securities’ annual report, from 2021 to the end of 2025, the company’s non-money fund management scale grew only from 610 billion yuan to 680 billion yuan.

On the business structure side, Huatai-PineBridge has long regarded active equity management as its core competitive advantage, with many star fund managers specializing in growth stocks. However, the scale of its hybrid funds dropped from a peak of 20k yuan in June 2021 to about 1,700 billion yuan by April 2026, nearly halving in five years. Money market funds occupy a significant portion of Huatai-PineBridge’s overall scale. As of April 2026, related products totaled 170B yuan, accounting for 40% of the company’s total asset management scale.

In terms of operating performance, most fund companies saw profit growth in 2025, but Huatai-PineBridge experienced increased revenue without corresponding profit growth. Orient Securities’ 2025 annual report shows Huatai-PineBridge achieved operating income of 446.54B yuan, up 17.19% year-on-year, ranking fifth in the industry; but net profit was 5.66B yuan, down 8.14% year-on-year. Looking at earlier data, Huatai-PineBridge’s net profit once exceeded 3.2 billion yuan in 2021.

The Dilemma of Star Funds

The performance trend of Huatai-PineBridge’s star fund manager Hu Xinwei’s managed products over the past few years partly reflects the development difficulties Huatai-PineBridge has faced in recent years.

Taking its largest managed fund, Huatai-PineBridge Consumer Industry Hybrid, as a reference, since 2021, this fund has experienced four consecutive years of losses, with annual declines of 4.20%, 20.48%, 17.89%, and 5.31%; in the 2025 market rebound, it only achieved a positive return of 1.89%, while similar products grew by 33.12% in net value during the same period, and the CSI 300 index rose by 17.66%. As of 2026, the fund’s performance has not yet reversed; as of April 6, it continued to decline by 8.60% year-to-date, ranking 4,551st among 5,075 similar products.

Multiple years of decline have affected investors’ willingness to hold. From the scale and share of Huatai-PineBridge Consumer Industry Hybrid, at the end of Q2 2020, the fund’s product share reached 1.42B units, with assets under management first surpassing 1.87B yuan. Over the following year and a half, by the end of 2021, the fund gained about 1 billion units in share, reaching a peak of 21.86B yuan in scale; by the end of 2023, although the fund had not been profitable for two years, most investors still chose to hold patiently. However, subsequent continued losses finally caused investors to lose patience.

Looking at fund shares, at the end of 2024–2025, the fund experienced net redemptions of 890 million units, and its scale fell below 10 billion yuan. As of the end of 2025, the fund’s 1.76B units and 8.923 billion yuan in scale were roughly the same as in 2020. In six years, Huatai-PineBridge Consumer Industry Hybrid returned to its starting point, but unlike before, it took away investors’ patience and trust.

As a star fund manager in the consumer sector, Hu Xinwei was not without achievements. Under his management, the fund initially focused heavily on liquor, with large holdings in Moutai, Shanxi Xinghuacun Fenjiu (600809.SH), and Wuliangye (000858.SZ), among industry leaders; by the end of 2025, the fund had significantly reduced its holdings in liquor, introducing more diversified targets such as home appliances, agriculture, beverages, and even consumer electronics. However, from his heavy holdings in stocks like Midea Group (000333.SZ), Haier Smart Home (600690.SH), Shandong Ocean Group (002311.SZ), Foshan Yuhua Glass (600660.SH), Dongpeng Beverage (605499.SH), and Anker Innovations (300866.SZ), he still could not escape the growth stock style of the market. Despite factors like personal style preferences and product characteristics limiting investment targets, as the market style shifted to AI, new energy, and small-cap stocks, Hu Xinwei’s adjustments still appeared ill-suited to the new environment.

From “Stock Picker Expert” to Passive Transformation

Behind Hu Xinwei’s difficulties lies a deep path dependence in Huatai-PineBridge’s research and development system. The company’s earlier reputation was built on its extreme practice of investment philosophy. Its top fund managers were mainly cultivated internally, and their consistent style allowed the team to generate sustained positive feedback.

Huatai-PineBridge’s general manager Zhang Hui once commented on the moat of public funds, saying that the products and services offered by public funds are similar, and only by accumulating past investment research can one turn it into a future advantage, enabling better performance than others. Under this model, research results mainly depend on the team rather than individuals; additionally, Huatai-PineBridge also uses equity incentives to align the interests of core employees with the company, attempting to reduce turnover. But in recent years, the large-scale personnel flow may reflect that the company’s previous path dependence is beginning to fail.

According to publicly available information, Huatai-PineBridge previously distinguished its investment targets using growth rate, ROE/ROIC quadrants, with the first quadrant representing power generation companies, which were Huatai-PineBridge’s preferred type. These companies typically had abundant free cash flow and high growth, such as liquor companies in the consumer sector. Companies relying on high capital expenditure to sustain high growth were called “capital addicts,” a trait common in tech and internet industries; cash cows are characterized by slow growth but stable returns, often found among mature industry leaders that are no longer the future mainstream. Companies that burn money wildly but remain unprofitable were called “capital killers” by Huatai-PineBridge.

However, this framework, validated before 2021, faced challenges in the subsequent market environment. When market style shifted from core assets to small and micro caps, quantitative trading, and dividend strategies, Huatai-PineBridge’s long-standing growth style and heavy holdings strategy appeared slow and heavy.

Regarding the fund manager team, Huatai-PineBridge’s numbers have not decreased. In mid-2021, the company had about 50 fund managers managing around 340 funds. According to iFinD data, as of April 7, 2026, the company had 99 fund managers managing 791 funds, doubling in five years. But in terms of asset management scale, the growth has been relatively limited.

On the other hand, Huatai-PineBridge’s reliance on internal star fund managers has not yielded good results in attracting external talent. In March 2022, Huatai-PineBridge hired Xie Changxu from HuaAn Fund, a fund manager who had won the Golden Fund Award and Golden Bull Award, and previously managed HuaAn New Silk Road Theme Stock A, which achieved a cumulative return of 131.68% from October 2018 to March 2022. But after joining Huatai-PineBridge, the 8 funds he managed (calculated separately by category) saw 5 of them fail to generate profits during his tenure, with all products in the past six months in loss.

In 2025, the company increased its layout of passive index products, with the scale of equity index funds growing nearly 70%, and ETF product lines expanding rapidly. By the end of 2025, Huatai-PineBridge had launched over 70 ETF products, with a total scale of nearly 140 billion yuan.

In a New Year’s letter to employees in 2026, Zhang Hui frankly said, “The east has passed, but the mulberry and elm are not late,” indicating a commitment to “passive investment, active choice,” developing a strategy based on passive underlying assets and making active strategic selections, providing customized solutions for clients through tool-based products.

However, after this, some employees still chose to leave. Behind the personnel turbulence, this former “stock picker expert” is facing a profound transformation challenge. When internal star fund managers’ performance remains under pressure, external talent recruitment yields less than expected, and the scale of its core active equity business shrinks significantly, whether Huatai-PineBridge can reinvent its competitiveness under the “passive investment, active choice” new framework remains to be seen.