The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board office in Toronto. The $256-billion pension fund is closing its Hong Kong office and shifting some staff to Singapore.COLE BURSTON/The Canadian Press
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is closing its Hong Kong office and shifting some staff to Singapore, as the $256-billion pension fund looks to streamline its operations in Asia.
The office, first opened in 2013, had already been pared back, as Teachers shifted its focus abroad and pulled back in China. The Hong Kong outpost currently houses about 20 staff who are mostly focused on private equity and venture capital investments.
Spokesperson Dan Madge said Teachers “made the difficult decision to close our Hong Kong office and plan to wind down on-the-ground operations” over the next 18 months or more.
The pension fund, which manages retirement savings for about 340,000 members who are mostly working and retired teachers in Ontario, opened offices in Singapore in 2020 and Mumbai in 2022.
“We will be optimizing our footprint in the Asia-Pacific region through our offices in Singapore and Mumbai, where we have teams focused across asset classes and regional markets,” Mr. Madge said in an e-mailed statement.
Bloomberg News first reported Teachers' decision to close the office.
Teachers plans to offer some Hong Kong-based employees a chance to move to its Singapore office, while others will leave the pension fund, Mr. Madge said.
In recent years, Teachers has pulled back on investments in China, as the business and political climate became more fraught. The pension fund paused direct investments in private assets in China in 2023, and that freeze is still in place. At the time, the pension fund had about $5-billion invested in China.
More recently, most of the investments Teachers makes from Hong Kong have been into markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan. The pension fund’s executive managing director in charge of the Asia-Pacific region, Bruce Crane, is based in Singapore.
“We believe these activities can be effectively and efficiently served out of Singapore, which enables us to bring together teams currently split across two locations,” Mr. Madge said. “The Asia Pacific region continues to be part of our long-term strategy.”
Major Canadian pension funds have added offices abroad over the past decade, preferring locations such as Singapore and Hong Kong for on-the-ground expertise in Asia. But in February, Alberta Investment Management Corp. closed offices in Singapore and New York to cut costs, little more than a year after it opened them.
Teachers had about 7 per cent of its assets, or $22-billion, in the Asia Pacific region as of the end of 2023. Of that total, 35 per cent was in private equity investments, with a further 24 per cent in infrastructure.
Teachers will report its financial results for 2024 on March 20.