The development has forced people to be conservative with their investment and saving plans since at least 2002.

The industry raised 1.48 trillion yuan (USD 212.5 billion) from 1,520 new launches in 2022, only half of the amount in 2021, the Securities Times newspaper reported on Thursday as quoted by The South China Morning Post.

The average fund size narrowed to 1 billion yuan from 1.6 billion yuan in 2021, the lowest in at least five years, it said.

Risk aversion gripped investors with the benchmark CSI 300 Index losing 22 percent in the equity market’s worst year since 2017.

The slump erased nearly 3 trillion yuan of market value from A-share companies, according to Bloomberg data as quoted by South China Morning Post.

As a result, bond funds attracted more subscribers than their equity counterparts, who ploughed in almost 990 billion yuan into 508 funds dedicated to bond portfolios, the newspaper added.

“Sentiment among household investors is relatively conservative amid a weak macroeconomic environment,”  Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis in Hong Kong, told the newspaper.

“The onshore stock market has been volatile, so many people would opt for fixed-income investments for stable returns,” Ng added.