ETF Rebranding Completes Across the Board, Elevating the 5 Trillion Market Competition

The Securities Times reporter Pei Ruirui

With the final batch of products completing their name changes, a landmark institutional adjustment in the ETF market has officially taken effect.

By the end of the first quarter of 2026, more than 1,400 ETFs across the entire market have all adopted the standard format of “core elements of the investment subject + ETF + the manager’s name” as their on-exchange trading ticker. This round of renaming campaigns, which lasted for several months, is not only a centralized implementation of regulatory requirements, but is also widely regarded in the industry as an important starting point for the ETF sector to enter the “brand era.”

All ETF renamings fully rolled out

On March 31, Penghua Fund announced that, having applied to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the company decided, effective immediately, to change the on-exchange trading tickers of its 12 Shenzhen Stock Exchange ETFs. At the same time, the company stated that all 69 ETFs under Penghua Fund would uniformly use the identifier “ETF Penghua” and that the “ETF Penghua” matrix has been unveiled in full.

This also means that the final fund company to complete the adjustments has officially wrapped up, and ETF trading tickers across the entire market have achieved unified and standardized requirements.

Behind this wave of renaming is the ongoing deepening of the regulator’s requirements for standardizing public fund naming. On November 19, 2025, the amended business guides released by the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges—“Shanghai Stock Exchange Fund Business Guide No. 1—Business Processing” and “Shenzhen Stock Exchange Securities Investment Fund Business Guide No. 1—Relevant Business Processing”—made clear that expanded ETF tickers must be named using the structure “core elements of the investment subject + ETF,” and must include the shortened name of the fund manager. For existing ETFs, their expanded tickers that are already in place must include the fund manager and the product name changes must be completed before March 31, 2026.

Before the renaming, ETF tickers followed a “first come, first served” principle. The same ticker could have one ETF listed on both the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges, making it difficult for investors to distinguish the product managers based solely on the name. For example, previously, there were as many as 40 on-exchange ETFs tracking the CSI A500 index. Among these 40 products, there were two products using similar names such as “A500 ETF Fund,” “CSI A500 ETF,” and “CSI A500 Enhanced ETF.” In addition, similar expressions such as “A500 ETF Index,” “A500 ETF Index Fund,” and “CSI A500 Leading Companies ETF” also appeared, leaving investors highly prone to “face blindness.”

After the renaming, this problem has been markedly improved. On the one hand, the manager identifier has been forcibly incorporated into the naming framework. On the other hand, the description of the investment subject has also become more standardized and precise. For instance, the “Dual-innovation Leading ETF” under Huabao Fund is clearly defined as “Dual-innovation 50 ETF Huabao,” and the “50ETF Fund” under CCB Jianxin Fund is clearly defined as “Shanghai 50 ETF Jianxin,” greatly reducing the time cost for investors to filter options.

Huabao Fund said that after renaming, the on-exchange ETF tickers are clearer, more concise, and easier to recognize. They not only directly reflect the index tracked behind the on-exchange ETF ticker, but also directly present the fund manager of the product. This naming approach, which is basically self-explanatory, enables investors to identify product characteristics more quickly and accurately, improves investment decision efficiency, and will also help the domestic ETF market develop in a more positive and healthy manner.

Competition in a 5-trillion-yuan market grows fiercer

In recent years, China’s ETF market has developed rapidly. As of the end of the first quarter of 2026, the total number of listed ETFs onshore reached 1,476, with total scale close to 5 trillion yuan. When the number of ETFs enters the “thousands” era, there are often a dozen or more products tracking the same index, and homogenous competition has become significantly more intense.

At this stage, the competitive model that relies solely on scale expansion has gradually become less effective. More and more fund companies have realized that simply competing on scale and fee rates can no longer sustain long-term competitive advantages. Industry competition has shifted from single-product competition to systematized brand competition.

Haitai-Pioneer Fund (Huatai-Pine Bridge) said that product naming standardization not only helps build a clearer and fairer market environment, but also signals that the market is moving from a phase of pure scale expansion to a new high-quality development stage driven by quality and brand competition. Specifically, by clearly including the manager identifier in the name, it means that institutions must accept supervision with long-term professional conduct and traceable market records. This helps to strengthen the responsibility of fund managers and drives industry competition to upgrade from past single-dimension contests of scale and liquidity to full-spectrum, systematized competition encompassing brand recognition, strategy depth, risk control, and investor services. Over time, it will gradually form a healthy industry ecosystem with investors’ interests at its core.

Guotai Fund also said that as the ETF market continues to expand, the number of ETF products corresponding to the same index is becoming increasingly dense, making it significantly more difficult for investors to screen from a large pool of products. Faced with the intensified homogenized competition, fund companies urgently need to build clear brand recognition and form differentiated competitive advantages. By directly linking the fund manager’s brand with ETF products, fund companies in the future will be better able to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities, further strengthen brand recognition and professional image, and provide investors with more credible and stable index investment services.

In addition, the arrival of the brand era also suggests that the “Matthew effect” in the ETF market will intensify. After naming standardization, mini-ETFs with serious homogeneity, poorer liquidity, and overly small scale may be cleared out faster. For example, on March 12, Xinhua Dividend Low Volatility ETF published a liquidation announcement. By February 5, the fund’s net asset value had been below 50 million yuan for 50 consecutive working days, triggering the fund contract termination clause stipulated in the fund contract.

Fund companies focus on brand value

As the tool attributes of ETFs become increasingly similar, real differentiation is also extending beyond the tool itself. This sets higher requirements for how fund managers can continuously improve the service experience and precisely match ETF investors’ needs.

“When there are more index funds and homogenous competition intensifies, what we sell is not just products, but also the philosophy behind product design and product layout, and the solutions provided by the products.” Over Peipei, deputy general director and fund manager in charge of Index and Quantitative Investing at E Fund, explained: “In the future, with the company’s number and scale of ETF products growing rapidly, the E Fund index team will focus more on front-end product design and back-end product services, further strengthening E Fund’s brand value within ETF products.”

E Fund said its index team is not simply tracking existing market indexes. Instead, it converts proactive management experience into a series of rigorous, transparent, and replicable index rules and strategy solutions based on deep insights into the macro economy and industry cycles. Its goal is to solve the real challenges investors face when investing across the entire market index products. What it provides is an end-to-end solution that runs from pre-investment—during investment—to post-investment, not a single product.

The AWM ETF team is committed to building a service system centered on asset allocation. It firmly believes that asset allocation services are a key path connecting asset management and wealth management. Not only did it lead the industry by publishing six ETF asset allocation indexes through an index company, but in an era of rapid development of the internet and artificial intelligence (AI), to serve investors more efficiently it released the “Jimu Planet” mini program, and has continuously iterated on content, modules, and efficiency.

Haitai-Pioneer Fund said that when the company’s dividend strategy faced relative headwinds at the beginning of the year, it launched an interactive plan called “Dividend Time Grid.” And when high premiums frequently appeared in cross-border ETFs, it promptly conveyed rational signals. These details may show that the deeper logic of branding is to enable investors, amid a multitude of choices, to find an anchoring point worth entrusting to long term by relying on the clear identifier of “ETF Haitai-Pioneer.”

From the implementation of renaming compliance to an upgrade in competitive dimensions, the ETF industry is completing a key leap from tool expansion to system-level competition. In this process, scale and fee rates are no longer the only answer; brand and ecosystem are becoming the new watershed.