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Vancouver forum aims to help wealthy Chinese families stay rich

Xinhua, October 3, 2015 Adjust font size:

An old Chinese saying says wealth does not pass three generations. A forum was held Friday here to help rich Chinese immigrant families keep their wealth for several generations.

The forum "Family, Inheritance, Innovation", hosted by the North American Chinese Family Society and attended by several financial, legal and academic experts, aimed to study and share the experiences of Western family companies in protecting their wealth and passing their businesses to the next generation.

Over the past decade, a great number of Chinese have migrated to Vancouver in west Canada, many of whom are successful business people or entrepreneurs.

Michael Sapphire, a Vancouver financial manager, said a big problem for the first-generation wealthy Chinese families is that they do not or do not have time to consider the transition of wealth from generation to generation.

Northwood Family Office Chairman and CEO Tom McCullough told Xinhua at the forum that the wealth in China is exploding and there are many more wealthy families in China than in the rest of the world.

"I think wealthy families are growing at about 7.5 percent every year (in China), which is much higher than the typical GDP rate," McCullough said.

McCullough helps run one of Canada's largest family offices and caters to families with between 10 million to 500 million Canadian dollars (7.6 million to 380 million U.S. dollars).

Inspired by American family businesses such as the Ford and the Rockefeller, family offices in Canada aim to manage every aspect of family affairs in a confidential manner. They can help with tax, insurance, investments and legal issues.

Since 2012, family offices have been emerging in China. The new Chinese firms are now looking to their Canadian counterparts for the right kind of strategies to help their rich clients.

McCullough believes that one of the things that is most significant for people to learn is the integrated nature of a family office, so "it's not just about a particular product or a particular area of expertise, but it's knowing how to integrate all the various pieces that are important to families."

Cindy Chen, the forum organizer, said that for China's expanding population of the newly rich, they're only getting started and must be aware of the pitfalls.

"Chinese family offices should learn from those classic cases of Western family offices and study the inheritance of Chinese family businesses, and integrate the findings with the traditional Chinese culture, family honor and values," Chen said. Endi