China and the US may be at loggerheads over trade but the US-listed BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has completed the registration of its onshore Chinese business.

BlackRock’s wholly foreign-owned enterprise in Shanghai has now registered its onshore advisory business in China, a big step for the world’s largest asset management firm. US-listed BlackRock oversees $6.2 trillion of client money.

The WFOE is called BlackRock Investment Management (Shanghai) and it has completed the registration of its onshore investment advisory service in China with the Asset Management Association of China.

The organisation can now provide investment advisory services to private asset management products issued by onshore securities and futures firms and their subsidiaries, as well as fund management companies and their subsidiaries in China, BlackRock said in a statement.

The firm’s onshore China investment quotas under the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor and Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor schemes amount to approximately $9.26 billion (as of March 2019).

The firm also taps into China’s capital markets through its involvement in the Stock Connect and Bond Connect programmes between Hong Kong and the mainland. BlackRock has also rolled out two Qualified Domestic Limited Partnership products for Chinese high net worth investors. 

BlackRock Investment Management (Shanghai) Co was registered with AMAC as a Private Fund Management (PFM) company in December 2017, and this was followed by the launch of its first onshore equity fund in June 2018.