Numerous Asian and APAC gaming jurisdictions made it into the Top 25 list in UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2025, as overall wealth worldwide accelerated last year by 4.6 percent.
Hong Kong, which operates sports betting and a lottery – came in at 3rd place in average wealth per adult ($601,195), maintaining its status from the previous year.
Meanwhile, Australia also maintained its placement at 5th, with $516,640 in average wealth per adult (AWPD).
Singapore rose by one position, to 7th in this year’s ranking, with average adult wealth at $441,596. It replaced New Zealand, which fell to 8th, with adult wealth at $393,773.
Taiwan, meanwhile, rose to 15th place, up one spot yearly, with $312,075 in average wealth per adult.
Similarly, South Korea jumped up one spot, to 20th, with AWPD at $251,223.
Japan, meanwhile, fell one spot, to 24th, with AWPD at $205,221.
The APAC region still has a long way to go in AWPD compared to the Americas and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), with just $66,808, compared to the Americas’ $311,846 and EMEA’s $167,696. The figures are weighted by population size within each region.
Growth in total personal wealth in 2024 was ‘solid but uneven’, notes UBS, indicating that the Americas saw an 11.35 percent rise, while APAC rose by 2.85 percent and EMEA increased by just 0.44 percent.
Analyzed by sub-segment, Greater China saw a 3.42 percent increase in total personal wealth in 2024, surpassing Southeast Asia’s 2.67 percent. China’s AWPD amounted to $88,985, while that of Southeast Asia was just $40,753.
Overall, the United States and Mainland China accounted for 54 percent of personal wealth from the 56 sample markets.
Meanwhile, Japan holds 4.5 percent, India has 3.4 percent, Hong Kong holds 0.8 percent and Singapore has 0.5 percent of global personal wealth.
Millionaires
‘The United States hosts the largest number of USD millionaires in the world by far, more than Western Europe and Greater China combined,’ notes the report.
Some 43.2 percent of millionaires are located in North America, while 12.9 percent are in Greater China and 9.3 percent are in Southeast Asia.
However, Greater China has the largest number of individuals with wealth between $100,000 and $1 million – at 28.2 percent of the total. Southeast Asia, meanwhile, has 15.6 percent.
The United States houses some 23.83 million millionaires. Mainland China comes a far second, with just 6.32 million millionaires. Japan comes in fourth, with 2.73 million, while Australia has 1.9 million, South Korea has 1.3 million, India has 917,000, Taiwan has 759,000, Hong Kong has 647,000 and Singapore has 331,000.
This comes from a sample of almost 60 million USD millionaires worldwide, who own a combined $226.47 trillion of assets.
But looking at percentages, the United States adds over a thousand millionaires every single day. For China, this figure falls to 386 new millionaires every day.
Billionaires
But moving up a bracket, UBS analysts found that there were some 2,891 billionaires within their sample group at the end of 2024, ‘a small increase over the year before’.
However, only 31 individuals ranked above the $50 billion mark.
