TOKYO, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank Group plans to offer 30 or more exchange traded funds in Japan in a year, building on the six it began offering in February, executives from the bank's unit in the country said on Friday.
Deutsche Bank, the world's fifth-largest ETF provider by asset size, hopes to lure investors including individuals who hold around $15 trillion, about the size of U.S. GDP, in assets still mostly in low-yielding savings accounts.
"Deutsche Bank Group has a plan to offer 30 ETFs in Japan in one year," Mitsuhisa Murata, managing director and head of global markets structuring at Deutsche Securities, told Reuters in an interview.
Deutsche offered a total of six Hong Kong-listed ETFs in Japan earlier in February.
The bank initially expects to offer ETFs listed on either the Hong Kong or Singapore markets, but it could potentially list its own ETFs on Japanese exchanges.
A total of 13 ETFs have been listed on the Hong Kong exchange.
"Deutsche Bank Group is considering listing ETFs in Japan in the future, but for now, our strategy is to offer Hong Kong listed ETFs to Japanese investors," said Hikaru Matsuno, vice president at Deutsche Securities.
ETFs are listed and trade like stocks, enabling investors to get exposure to a region or sector without having to own the underlying index components.
Deutsche Bank's ETFs, branded db x-trackers, manage $35.92 billion in assets, behind No.1 ETF provider iShares, a unit of BlackRock Inc.
The asset value of Japan's ETF market is about $25 billion, the top market in the Asia-Pacific region, but just 3.5 percent the size of the U.S. market, the world's No. 1. (Reporting by Chikafumi Hodo and Michiko Iwasaki; Editing by Joseph Radford)