By Selena Li
HONG KONG (Reuters) – U.S.-based Morningstar has cut or relocated several hundreds of jobs at its China hub Shenzhen, and is moving operations to other countries, it said on Wednesday, as global firms struggle to comply with the country’s new data regulatory landscape.
The financial services firm whose offerings include investment research for mutual funds and asset management, has around 1,000 staff based in the southern Chinese city, it said in a statement.
Some staff will be transferred in the coming months to Mumbai, Toronto, Madrid, or Chicago – its global headquarters, a company spokesperson separately told Reuters, adding most of them are involved in “providing support to global operations”.
Morningstar said in the statement the “strategic shift” of its China operations is to “focus entirely on the domestic market”, indicating its China-servicing teams will be not be impacted by the job cuts.
“We’re in the process of defining a new strategy for China market growth,” it said, without elaborating.
Bloomberg first reported the move earlier on Wednesday.
As China continues to tighten rules on data privacy and cybersecurity, global financial firms operating in China are increasingly concerned that transferring company or client data offshore would become more cumbersome.
Earlier this month, the cyber security authority in the world’s second-largest economy unveiled a set of rules on assessing outbound data of firms operating in the country, which will come into force on Sept. 1.
Morningstar entered China two decades ago before it ventured into equities research and portfolio management globally.
(Reporting by Selena Li in Hong Kong, additional reporting by Samuel Shen in Shanghai; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and David Evans)
