As international attention clustered on Hainan’s border closure at the turn of 2025–26, Hong Kong was doing something quieter and more consequential: rewriting its economic story. In 2025 the city’s GDP expanded by an estimated 3.5 percent, accelerating from 2.6 percent the year before and marking a third consecutive year of growth. The old jibe that Hong Kong has finance but no science and technology is losing purchase as policy and markets push the city toward a hybrid model of capital and innovation.
External demand has powered a brisk export cycle, particularly for electronics, while a sustained rebound in tourism has revived the services sector and helped local household spending swing back into positive territory. Financial markets have reflected that momentum: the Hang Seng rose about 29 percent in 2025, its best performance since 2017, and Hong Kong led global IPO fundraising with more than HK$280 billion raised. Asset and wealth management also attracted fresh capital, with net inflows of roughly US$41 billion in the first nine months of the year — roughly one and a half times the full-year flows of 2024.
The composition of new listings underlines the shift. Some 119 companies listed in 2025, and about seven in ten came from information technology, biotechnology, new energy and advanced industrial sectors. High‑profile deals and property purchases by China’s tech giants accompanied deal activity: JD’s industrial unit listed in December 2025 and returned to the market with another filing in January 2026; Alibaba paid roughly HK$7.2 billion for a major office stake; and major financial and corporate buyers continued to reshape the city’s commercial real estate map.
Policy and geography are steering the reorientation. Authorities have foregrounded the Northern Metropolis as a “living + innovation + industrial” corridor, explicitly pairing the city’s southern financial core with a northern science and technology cluster. The Hong Kong side of the Shenzhen–Hong Kong innovation cooperation zone — the Hetao/HK park — opened its first phase in December 2025, with three buildings operational, laboratory occupancy near 80 percent and more than 60 tenants spanning life sciences, AI, robotics and energy storage. A second phase is already planned and more buildings are due online from 2027.
The consequence is a subtler, more resilient growth model: international capital markets and wealth management remain the city’s ballast while a nascent tech ecosystem restores balance and opens new routes for growth. For investors and policymakers alike the change matters because it strengthens Hong Kong’s comparative advantage within the Greater Bay Area — not by replacing finance but by integrating it with upstream R&D and technology manufacturing across the border in Shenzhen.
Caveats remain. The city still depends heavily on external demand cycles and on mainland connectivity for talent, land and manufacturing capacity. Sustaining the momentum will require continued policy support, accessible lab space and international regulatory clarity on issues such as data and IP protection. Even so, Hong Kong’s incremental pivot from a finance-only label to a dual role as an international finance centre and a gateway for Bay‑Area tech investment is now visible in the numbers and the buildings that have been filling up.