A wave of concentrated liquidations has hit pension-focused Fund of Funds (FOFs). According to Wind data, as of March 29, 11 pension FOFs have been liquidated this year (counted by liquidation end date, including only initial share classes), involving six public fund managers including China Europe Fund, Hua An Fund, and ICBC Credit Suisse Asset Management. This figure is already close to the 14 funds liquidated in the entire previous year, indicating a significantly accelerated pace of closures.
An industry source revealed that institutional investors typically hold a high proportion of pension FOF shares, with some products seeing institutional ownership exceed 90%. When institutional funds are redeemed en masse, the product's assets can quickly fall below the liquidation threshold, making closure an inevitable outcome.
The pace of liquidations has quickened notably. Within less than three months of the year, 11 pension FOFs have completed liquidation, compared to 12 and 14 funds liquidated in the full years of 2024 and 2025, respectively. The inability to achieve sufficient scale remains a primary challenge for pension FOF development. Many of these products were established between 2022 and 2023 and were liquidated after failing to meet the 200 million yuan minimum asset requirement by their three-year anniversary, triggering contract termination clauses.
The most recent batch of pension FOFs to be formally "retired" were three products from Yingda Fund: Yingda Yanfu Pension 2035 Three-Year Holding, Yingda Yanfu Pension 2055 Three-Year Holding, and Yingda Yanfu Pension 2060 Three-Year Holding. Liquidation for these funds began on March 2 and concluded on March 11. As of the last net asset value disclosure date on February 27, 2026, the cumulative returns since inception for these three FOFs were 10.37%, 4.9%, and 15.25%, respectively.
China Europe Fund also saw three of its pension FOFs liquidated this year. The China Europe Foresee Pension Target 2045 Three-Year Holding A and China Europe Foresee Balanced Pension Three-Year Holding A began liquidation on January 2, 2026, while the China Europe Foresee Pension 2055 Five-Year Holding A commenced liquidation at the end of 2025. All three products were managed solely by fund manager Deng Da throughout their existence. By the end of the third quarter of 2025, Deng Da had entered the ranks of fund managers overseeing assets exceeding ten billion yuan, making him the only manager in this cohort to achieve that status among the 11 liquidated pension FOFs.
Additionally, the Hua An Pension Target 2050 Five-Year Holding and Hua An Pension Target 2035 Three-Year Holding were both liquidated successively in January of this year, managed solely by fund manager He Yizhi.
Institutional capital has proven to be a double-edged sword. Due to excessively high institutional ownership, a full redemption by these investors often forces pension FOFs into liquidation. For instance, institutional ownership consistently hovered around 99% for both the Hua An Pension Target 2050 Five-Year Holding and Hua An Pension Target 2035 Three-Year Holding FOFs since their inception. During their operation, institutional ownership stood at 95% and 67% for the ICBC Active Pension Target Five-Year Holding and Peng Hua Pension 2040 Five-Year Holding, respectively. Furthermore, institutional ownership in the BOC Aaron Active Pension Five-Year Holding exceeded 58% in both 2024 and the first half of 2025, and was over 70% from the full year 2023 through the first half of 2024.
It is noteworthy that pension target FOF products were often initially designed with institutional capital acting as "seed money" to facilitate launch. This model provided crucial support in the early stages but also planted the seeds for potential future liquidation. Institutional capital typically seeks stable investment returns and liquidity management. If a product's performance falls short of expectations or if the institution adjusts its own asset allocation strategy, concentrated redemptions can easily occur. For products that are already small in scale, the withdrawal of institutional funds often becomes the final straw that leads to collapse.
Industry professionals believe that the concentrated liquidation of pension target FOFs does not signify the failure of this product type but rather reflects self-optimization within the industry ecosystem. With the comprehensive rollout of the personal pension system, pension target FOFs, as key allocation tools for the third pillar of retirement planning, still possess substantial long-term growth potential. The liquidation mechanism helps eliminate products lacking market competitiveness, allowing resources to concentrate towards managers with sustained management capabilities and brand influence. The future development of pension FOFs is expected to place greater emphasis on investor guidance and long-term performance accumulation, making reliance solely on institutional capital to maintain scale an unsustainable model.