SAFE Investment Company, the Hong Kong-based entity responsible for managing a third of China’s US$3.227 trillion foreign exchange reserves, is hiring. According to a job posting on HKCampusRecruitment on the WeChat social media platform, the operator of the world’s third-largest sovereign wealth fund is seeking trainees who could advance to investment analysts or traders after completing a two-year programme. The firm is seeking trainees for fundamental research and systematic trading, which would give them exposure to global financial markets, according to the advertisement. The successful candidates’ responsibilities include analysing index changes, forecasting potential liquidity events and day-to-day portfolio management. Founded in June 1997, a month before Hong Kong’s formal return to China’s sovereignty, SAFE Investment, Hua’an in Chinese, is one of the “four golden flowers” – a quartet of investment firms under the country’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). SAFE manages the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world at more than US$3.22 trillion. In January, Pan Gongsheng, governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said in Hong Kong that China would “significantly increase” the allocation of the nation’s reserves to Hong Kong, alluding to the role that SAFE Investment might play. Pan did not elaborate on the size of the increase or where the reserves would be invested. However, industry insiders estimate that the current allocation of reserves in the city is around 16 per cent, which could rise to 30 per cent in the medium term and as much as 50 per cent in the long term. They see it as a positive factor for Hong Kong’s stock and bond markets. Many viewed Pan’s statement as strong support from Beijing for Hong Kong as an international financial centre and an offshore yuan hub amid growing uncertainties in US President Donald Trump’s second term. Since January, the PBOC has taken a series of measures to strengthen Hong Kong’s role as a global hub for the offshore yuan. These include a 100 billion yuan (US$13.8 billion) trade financing facility for banks and a new programme for offshore yuan repurchase agreements, a short-term borrowing instrument. The SAFE Investment job advertisement posted on Friday requires candidates to have a master’s degree or a higher qualification in finance engineering, accounting, applied mathematics or computer science from recognised universities, with fluency in both English and Mandarin. In another advertisement posted in July 2023 on the same social media platform, SAFE Investment was described as a “well-established international asset management firm, which is one of the major institutional investors in the global financial markets and one of the biggest funds by AUM [assets under management] in Hong Kong”.