About Economic Digest

Economic Digest

Economic Digest (Chinese: 經濟一週; pinyin: Jīngjì Yīzhōu, abbreviated ED and branded online as EDigest) is a Hong Kong weekly financial magazine launched on 15 June 1981. It is an investment-themed magazine, published on Saturdays, that provides analysis of the investment, banking and financial markets of Hong Kong and mainland China for retail and professional investors. For most of its modern life it has been published within the Emperor Group's magazine business — recorded in Hong Kong listings as New Media / New Transmedia publishing, and in the group's own reports as one of the five weekly magazines of New Media Group, alongside Oriental Sunday, Weekend Weekly, New Monday and Fashion and Beauty. Its principal competitor is iMoney, the financial weekly of the Hong Kong Economic Times group, with which it is sometimes confused: the two are rival titles from rival groups, and the competition between them defined Hong Kong's retail investment magazine market in the 2000s and 2010s.

Few Hong Kong magazines of any kind have published continuously for more than four decades. Economic Digest's own account of itself, given in its corporate profiles, is that for over forty years it has accompanied Hong Kong people through good economic times and bad. Its print formula — a single issue divided into four books covering strategy, consumption and property, derivatives and blue-chip shares — was built for the Hong Kong retail investor, and its digital successor, EDigest, carries the same brand into stock news, property, financial planning, fintech and Greater Bay Area coverage.

Founding in 1981

Economic Digest was founded on 15 June 1981, a date recorded in a Hong Kong media compendium published by the China News Service's Hong Kong branch and carried in the magazine's reference entries. The launch came at the start of a decade in which Hong Kong's stock and property markets drew an ever-wider public into investing, and in which Chinese-language financial journalism expanded rapidly to serve them. A weekly, rather than a daily, rhythm suited the magazine's purpose: where the financial dailies reported prices and news, a weekly could step back and offer strategy — what to buy, what to avoid, and how the week's markets in Hong Kong and on the mainland fitted together.

The magazine's longevity from that 1981 start is itself a central fact of its history. It predates the Hong Kong Economic Times (founded 1988), whose group would later become both its chief rival's owner and the publisher most often wrongly credited with it, and it has published through the 1997 handover, the Asian financial crisis, the global financial crisis and the digital transformation of Hong Kong media.

Ownership: the Emperor Group's magazine business

Economic Digest is published by the publishing arm of Albert Yeung's Emperor Group, recorded in Chinese reference sources as New Transmedia Planning (新傳企劃) and in the group's English-language reporting as New Media Group. The interim reports of New Media Group Holdings, the listed magazine company, describe the group as one of the leading magazine groups in Hong Kong and list its five weekly magazines: Oriental Sunday (東方新地), Weekend Weekly (新假期), New Monday (新Monday), Fashion and Beauty (流行新姿) and Economic Digest (經濟一週). Each magazine, the group states, holds a distinguished and well-established position in its respective market, with loyal readership from distinctive sectors and age groups; Economic Digest was the group's finance title within a portfolio otherwise devoted to entertainment, travel, youth and fashion.

The magazine's present-day operations are run by Media Publishing Limited from the Quayside, 77 Hoi Bun Road, Kwun Tong, the address given for the developer of the official EDigest app and matching the headquarters given in the brand's corporate profiles, which also place its head office in Kwun Tong. The group behind it diversified beyond print into digital business and thematic websites, a path the Economic Digest brand followed with its own app and membership platform.

The four-book format

The print Economic Digest was published every Saturday, priced at HK$20 in its later print years, and was issued as one magazine in four books, under the promise of helping readers attack and defend in building wealth. The main book drew on the magazine's decades of financial-market experience to provide investment strategy closely fitted to the market. The second book, Cash, covered consumer offers and price-comparison information, property investment strategy, new property market intelligence and personal financial stories — the household side of wealth building.

The third book was devoted to derivatives: titled in successive forms for the certificate and warrant markets, it offered professional analysis of indices and sector warrants and bull/bear certificates, aimed at readers trading short-term movements. The fourth book, the Big Blue Chip Guide, analysed the investment value of blue-chip shares in depth, including ten years of detailed company operating data, sector analysis, practical technical-analysis teaching and methods for finding value among large companies. The four-book structure was the magazine's identity in print: a single purchase that segmented its readers — strategists, savers and property buyers, derivatives traders and long-term stock pickers — and served each segment in its own signature.

Readership and market position

According to the two authoritative market research reports cited in its reference entries — the Nielsen Media Index and the Synovate Media Atlas reports of 2010 — Economic Digest was then the financial weekly with the largest readership in Hong Kong, with readers numbering as high as 180,000. Its readership consisted mainly of entrepreneurs, bankers, investors, senior managers and executives concerned with the global economy, investment information and the business environment of the market.

By 2014 its position had shifted but remained near the top of its category. Marketing magazine's Media Benchmarking Survey that year recorded Economic Digest holding second place among local business magazines, behind Capital Weekly, with a weekly readership of 111,000 in the Nielsen media figures quoted by the survey — and noted that the financial weekly had recently moved into the digital field, launching thematic websites synchronised with mobile and tablet applications. University media guides of the period describe the magazine in matching terms, as providing comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the investment, banking and financial markets of Hong Kong and mainland China for its investors.

Diversification and the My Money experiment

Like other Hong Kong magazine publishers, the Economic Digest business periodically tried to extend the brand beyond the weekly. A Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing of the group that then published it records that during 2001 Economic Digest diversified its business into a book-publishing series and a personal-finance weekly called My Money. The book series recorded a small profit, and management expected that business to grow; My Money, however, faced a very severe operating environment amid recent financial-market volatility and the September 11 attacks in the United States, and the spin-off magazine was discontinued from September 2001.

The episode is a compact lesson in the economics of Hong Kong financial publishing: a weekly whose value rose with readers' appetite for investment advice was itself exposed to the market cycles it covered. The core title, with its established readership and advertising base, survived the same downturn that killed its younger spin-off within the year of its launch — and the book-publishing experiment showed the group's instinct, shared across the industry, to convert magazine expertise into adjacent products.

The rival across the market: iMoney

Economic Digest's main competitor, as its reference entries state directly, is iMoney, published by the Hong Kong Economic Times group. iMoney was launched on 27 October 2007 as a financial retail weekly published on Saturdays, focusing on wealth management together with innovative business, workplace and self-enhancement coverage of the Hong Kong and mainland markets — a formula aimed squarely at the Saturday investment reader Economic Digest had served since 1981. The two Saturday financial weeklies, one from the Emperor magazine stable and one from the HKET newspaper group, competed for the same retail investors and the same financial advertisers for the rest of the print era.

The rivalry also frames the magazine's awards activity. Economic Digest ran its own business honours, including the Best SME Partners awards recorded in the early 2010s — Hutchison Telecommunications listed Best SME Partners awards from Economic Digest for both its mobile communications network and its internet service — and the EDigest Outstanding Listed Enterprises Awards, under which New World Development recorded an Outstanding GBA Property Enterprise award in 2022. Such awards embedded the magazine in the small-business and listed-company communities it wrote about.

EDigest: the digital transformation

The brand's digital incarnation, EDigest, extends the magazine across a website, an app and video. The app's published description sets out the modern editorial territory: daily financial news with real-time pushes of important market news; an array of experts providing professional investment strategy for Hong Kong and global markets; tracking of local and global stock trends, analysing potential stocks and sectors, and explaining virtual currencies, NFTs and blockchain from simple to deep; coverage of major Chinese stocks and American stocks, banks' research reports, fund holdings and the northbound flows of the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Connect schemes.

Alongside markets, the digital brand kept the print magazine's household-finance strand and enlarged it. Its property coverage follows Hong Kong's new and second-hand markets, subsidised housing, overseas purchases, mortgages, renting and renovation; its financial-planning "lazy packs" cover fixed-deposit offers, insurance comparison, tax-filing strategy, electronic-payment tutorials for services such as PayMe, WeChat Pay and Alipay, government policy, the Mandatory Provident Fund, loans, passive income and saving methods. A video arm, Jingyi TV, produces programmes including expert economic analysis and celebrity interviews, and further sections cover the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area and immigration. A paid membership unlocks member content including in-depth financial analysis, exclusive guest interviews, stock-selection tips, podcasts, programme-trading teaching and the e-weekly itself.

Coverage in the platform era

The brand's stated specialties in its current corporate profiles map how far a 1981 investment weekly has travelled: finance and investing, virtual banks, fintech, the property market, entrepreneurship, small and medium-sized enterprises, management, the Greater Bay Area, cryptocurrencies, economics, ESG, startups, digital transformation, technology and financial planning. The through-line is the founding proposition — investment as everyone's food for thought, in the brand's own English phrasing, intended to empower readers with the business and financial understanding to pursue their lifestyle and dreams — restated for an audience that reads on phones and trades through apps.

Economic Digest's place in Hong Kong media history is therefore double. In print, it was for decades one of the territory's defining retail-investment weeklies: founded in 1981, the most-read financial weekly in Hong Kong in the 2010 research reports, and still second in its category in 2014, forty years of Saturdays serving the city's small investors. As EDigest, it is an example of a legacy Hong Kong magazine brand rebuilt as a digital finance platform — website, app, video and membership — while its print-era rivalries and four-book formula remain the clearest record of how Hong Kong's investment magazine market worked at its peak.