The public fund management industry in 2026 is undergoing a notable wave of fund liquidations. According to Wind data, as of September 4th, 225 funds have already triggered liquidation this year, quickly approaching last year's total of 281. Based on the current pace, it is highly likely that a new annual record will be set. Among this wave of liquidations, one of the industry's earliest established fund managers stands out prominently: Bosera Fund.

This year, Bosera Fund has completed the liquidation of 14 products, making it the only public fund company in the industry with a double-digit liquidation count. Notably, including this year, this marks the fourth consecutive year it has led the industry in the number of liquidations. On one hand, it has consistently topped the liquidation rankings for years, with many bond funds passively closing due to institutional investor withdrawals. On the other hand, its profit growth is lagging behind amid an industry recovery. Despite its trillion-yuan asset base, its active equity management capabilities remain a notable weakness. However, its impressive investor profitability ratios and the rapid growth of its ETF and FOF businesses reveal the company's efforts to adapt and transform.

Liquidation Leader: While Others Wind Down Equity Funds, Bosera Focuses on Pure Bond Funds

Bosera Fund has liquidated 14 products since the start of 2026, a figure that starkly contrasts with its peers. Southern Fund and Fullgoal Fund have recorded zero liquidations this year, while E Fund and GF Fund have each liquidated only one. Other leading fund managers have seen a maximum of nine liquidations this year. Looking further back, Bosera Fund liquidated 10 funds in 2023, 13 in 2024, and 16 in 2025, ranking first in the industry for three consecutive years. Given the current trajectory, it is highly probable that Bosera will top the charts again in 2026, achieving a rare four-year streak in liquidation numbers.

The structure of these liquidations is particularly noteworthy. While other major fund managers have predominantly liquidated equity-focused products, Bosera Fund's historical liquidations have included many equity funds. However, this year, 11 of the 14 liquidated products were pure bond funds. How is it that a fund manager known for its fixed-income strength is seeing its most stable area become a hotspot for liquidations? The answer lies in the product structure. Most of these liquidated pure bond funds are customized institutional bond funds, not available to retail investors. They are tailored for a small number of institutional clients, with a single institution often holding over 99% of the shares. These funds have periodic open redemption periods, management fees are compressed to between 0.15% and 0.3%, and the fund company itself initially subscribes 10 million yuan to establish the fund. The lifecycle of such products is entirely different from retail funds: performance is never the deciding factor; institutional clients are the sole source of capital.

Take the Bosera Yufeng Pure Bond 3-Month Fixed-Open Fund as an example. According to its 2025 semi-annual report, the fund had only 262 holders, with institutional ownership at 100% and an average holding of over 7 million units per holder—truly an "institutional-only" product. Its scale trajectory underscores this fragility: from the second half of 2023 to the first half of 2025, the fund's scale remained stable at around 2 billion yuan. However, during one open period in Q3 2025, institutions redeemed 1.249 billion units, a 65% outflow, causing the scale to plummet to under 700 million yuan. Another 380 million units were withdrawn in Q4, leaving only 690,000 units by the end of Q2 2026, with a scale of just 730,000 yuan. In July, a unitholder meeting voted to terminate the fund contract—institutional clients effectively voted to close the fund.

Notably, this was not the fund's first existential crisis. As early as 2021, the product experienced a severe contraction: its scale had long hovered around 3 billion yuan, but in Q3 2021, it shrank by 80% to 581 million yuan, and in Q4, it dropped by over 90% to just 51 million yuan, coming dangerously close to the liquidation threshold. It only recovered after institutional capital returned. The two dramatic scale contractions highlight that products lacking a retail buffer are highly dependent on institutional allocation decisions. Even if the scale appears substantial in the short term, once institutional capital exits en masse without new inflows, the fund can rapidly slide toward liquidation. This product is not an isolated case. The holder structures of the liquidated funds all point to the same conclusion: Bosera Fushun Pure Bond Fund's 2024 annual report showed institutional ownership at 99.92%, with a single institution's share once exceeding 20%. Bosera Fuyue Pure Bond Fund's 2025 annual report showed institutional ownership at 96.27%. Once institutions adjust their asset allocations and withdraw in stages across open periods, the fund's scale quickly declines—either falling below the 50 million yuan red line, triggering contract termination clauses, or leading to a unitholder vote for liquidation. Fund companies can neither easily prevent this nor typically want to: management fees are already minimal, and the cost of "preserving the shell" after the scale shrinks is higher. Combined with regulatory guidance to "liquidate as appropriate," letting these funds wind down naturally becomes the optimal solution.

This leads to a counter-intuitive outcome: even funds with decent performance are not immune to liquidation. Bosera Yusheng Pure Bond Fund's Class A shares, established in 2016, posted a cumulative return of 42.65% over ten years before terminating on March 26th this year. Bosera Anren 1-Year Fixed-Open Bond Fund, with a five-year return of 22.49%, also closed in April. Their "cause of death" was scale—when institutions leave, the fund empties out. Objectively speaking, fund liquidation is a natural part of the market-driven evolution of the public fund industry. However, when a major fund manager tops the liquidation charts for four consecutive years, it warrants closer scrutiny: does the mass closure of custom institutional bond funds reflect an over-reliance on institutional clients in its fixed-income business? How long will it take to digest the historical burden of a distribution-focused issuance strategy?

Revenue and Profit Growth Trailing Among Top-Tier Institutions

While the wave of liquidations can be partly explained by industry-wide factors, the lagging performance in profitability raises more pressing questions. As the industry's overall profitability improves significantly, the rankings among the top players are shifting. In the first half of 2026, GF Fund surpassed E Fund for the first time with a net profit of 2.459 billion yuan, claiming the top spot in industry profitability. According to the 2026 semi-annual report of its largest shareholder, China Merchants Securities Co., Ltd. (600999.SH), Bosera Fund reported revenue of 2.659 billion yuan in H1, up 12.86% year-on-year, and net profit of 804 million yuan, up 5.3%. Among the top ten fund managers by scale, Bosera's growth rates for both metrics only outperformed Tianhong Fund. Other leading institutions generally saw revenue growth above 30% and net profit growth above 20%. The gap is even more pronounced when viewed against the broader industry: the 65 fund companies that disclosed data saw an average net profit growth of approximately 36% in H1 2026.

The slowdown in Bosera Fund's profit growth may be linked to its product structure. First, there is a lackluster scale expansion. As of the end of June, Bosera Fund's total public fund management scale stood at 1.18 trillion yuan, with non-money market fund scale at 699.197 billion yuan. These figures represent growth of only 1.78% and 0.93% respectively from the end of last year, significantly trailing the industry-wide growth rates of 6.65% and 6.34%. It's not just this year; since breaking through the trillion-yuan mark in Q1 2024, Bosera has faced growth bottlenecks, failing to keep pace with the industry's expansion. Its ranking by fund scale has slipped from 6th at the end of 2024 to 8th by the end of Q2 2026.

Second, there's a structural imbalance in its product mix. Fixed-income funds account for three-quarters of its scale. Within its non-money market funds, the mixed funds that truly reflect active management capabilities have a scale of only 67.6 billion yuan, ranking 23rd in the industry—a clear mismatch with its status as one of the "original ten" fund managers and a trillion-yuan institution. A small active equity base means that management fee income must primarily come from "low-margin" products like money market funds, bond funds, and ETFs. Third, the strategy of "compensating for low fees with volume" has reached its limits. With bond market yields declining and fee competition intensifying, management fees for fixed-income products are being squeezed. Money market funds, in particular, generate scale but little profit. The old approach of flooding the market with bond funds to trade scale for revenue has diminishing returns, and the company now faces a critical need to pivot.

Transformation Efforts Are Underway

Despite the earnings pressure, Bosera Fund is not standing still. The mandatory disclosure of the proportion of profitable investors in 2026 semi-annual reports provides a new benchmark for the market, shifting focus from merely net asset value fluctuations to the real investment experience of ordinary fund holders. Among 15 major fund managers with over 100 disclosed products, Bosera Fund's 131 sampled products showed an average profitable investor ratio of 86.1% over the past year, ranking third. This data also reflects the company's increased focus on holder experience and its shift toward pursuing long-term, high-quality development. It's important to note that this sample includes both fixed-income and equity products. Fixed-income products naturally tend to have higher profitable investor ratios, which can skew the overall figure; it cannot be directly equated to over 80% of equity fund investors making money.

Focusing on the active management track, among actively managed mixed and equity products established for more than a year, 28 have profitable investor ratios exceeding 99% (excluding FOF funds), and 94 funds have ratios exceeding 90%. This data is quite compelling: the investment side is delivering a good track record for holder experience. However, this performance advantage has not smoothly translated into scale growth. Active equity scale remains weak, and its ranking in mixed funds is not particularly strong. "Good performance, profitable holders, but slow scale growth" has become a real challenge for Bosera. The transformation is already on the table. Currently, Bosera Fund's business focus is on three tracks: Fixed Income Plus, FOF, and ETF, aiming to leverage its existing strengths to fill business gaps and open new growth avenues.

Fixed Income Plus builds on Bosera's fixed-income foundation. The company has explicitly stated its goal to transform from "strong in fixed income" to a "Fixed Income Plus" powerhouse, establishing a multi-tiered product matrix to absorb residents' prudent wealth management funds and expand its client base from institutions to individuals. However, this track is crowded, and equity enhancement and drawdown control remain practical challenges. Bosera was an early mover in the FOF business and has developed a complete product line covering bond FOFs, mixed FOFs, ETF-FOFs, and pension FOFs. The FOF issuance market has been hot in 2026, and Bosera has also produced blockbuster products; leading newly issued FOFs have raised nearly 6 billion yuan each, and its total FOF scale has exceeded 10 billion yuan. Multiple products have been filed and approved this year, making FOF a significant source of new scale. But the FOF track is also fraught with challenges. Strategy convergence is evident across the industry, and performance dispersion and poor holding experiences have led to redemptions and even liquidations of some FOFs. For instance, the Bosera Jixing Allocation Optimal Selection 6-Month Holding Mixed FOF entered liquidation proceedings on August 30th. Retaining clients over the long term requires robust asset allocation capabilities, which cannot be achieved simply through distribution channels.

ETF is the segment where Bosera's transformation has already gained significant scale. As of the end of Q2 2026, its non-money market ETF scale reached 229.977 billion yuan, a 41% year-on-year increase, ranking seventh in the industry. It has built a particularly strong position in bond ETFs, with a complete lineup of interest rate bond, credit bond, science and technology innovation bond, and convertible bond ETFs. Its stock ETFs focus on themes like technology, innovation, and green industry, forming a comprehensive toolkit. ETFs can contribute substantial management scale, but their weakness lies in generally low fee rates, limiting profit elasticity from scale. How to convert this vast ETF toolkit into management fee income, while also creating synergies with its FOF, fund sales, and investment advisory businesses, is a practical issue Bosera needs to resolve. All three tracks have their foundations but also face intense industry competition. Fixed Income Plus and FOF lean more toward retail clients, which can help offset the volatility of institutional bond fund inflows and outflows. However, none of these three tracks can quickly compensate for the weakness in active equity business.

To improve its revenue and profit growth, the effectiveness of the transformation will still need time to be proven. For Bosera Fund, the challenges ahead are clear: how to convert its solid investment performance and positive holder profitability experience into tangible scale growth; how to turn its ETF and FOF tool tracks from scale advantages into profit contributions; and how to shore up its active equity weakness. Some of the cleanup is done, and the pivot is underway, but the real test is only just beginning.