NEW YORK, October 19, 2005 — Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global index provider, today announced the launch of the Dow Jones China Offshore 50 Index.
The Dow Jones China Offshore 50 Index represents the largest, super-sector leaders of companies whose primary operations are in mainland China but trade at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq or American Stock Exchange. Stocks included in the index are H shares, red chips, ADR/ADS and Chinese stocks listed in the U.S. If a stock is traded on two or more overseas exchanges, only the listing with the highest trading volume is included in the selection universe.
The Dow Jones China Offshore 50 Index is designed to serve as an underlying for investment products such as mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other investable products.
“With the new Dow Jones China Offshore 50 index, we are now able to provide investors with an investable Chinese blue-chip exposure following the well-established methodology of the Dow Jones EURO STOXX 50 index,” said Lars Hamich, managing director of STOXX Ltd., the joint venture responsible for Dow Jones Indexes’ business development in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. “Furthermore, our index is large enough to offer the highly requested flexibility to consider the growing number of Chinese companies to go public offshore.”
He added, “China has experienced tremendous growth, and its capital market has attracted both institutional and retail investors alike. The local Chinese market offers only restricted access to foreign investors, therefore, investing in China offshore is an attractive alternative.”
The Dow Jones China Offshore 50 index is weighted by free-float market capitalization and will be reviewed semiannually, in March and September. The weights of individual components are capped at 10% of the float-adjusted market capitalization of the index.
Historical index values are available daily back to Dec. 31, 2000. The base value of the index is set at 1,000 as of that date.
Further information, such as the component list and performance data, is available on the Dow Jones China Offshore 50 Index web site.