Singapore may yet be the best place to try to grow wealth the fastest globally, what with the latest Barclays Wealth Insights report showing that over 50 per cent of the city-state's rich managed to accumulate their wealth in less than ten years.

Singapore may yet be the best place to try to grow wealth the fastest globally, what with the latest Barclays Wealth Insights report showing that over 50 per cent of the city-state's rich managed to accumulate their wealth in less than ten years.

According to the report titled Origins and Legacy: The Changing Order of Wealth Creation, 58 per cent per cent of Singapore's rich believe their accumulation of wealth happened rapidly, whereas only 25 per cent of Hong Kong's and 22 per cent of China's respondents held the same view.

And while 51 per cent of Singapore's HNW individuals built up their assets in a decade, only about 30 per cent of respondents in India took this length of time to do so, followed by 27 per cent from China and 16 per cent from Hong Kong. Over a quarter of the Singaporean respondents also said that they saw their assets increase at least fivefold in their lifetimes.

The significance of the report may lie in the fact that, with rapidly expanding wealth and a still-large cohort of first-generation high net worth individuals, such people will often need a different type of wealth management advice to those who might have inherited it in a more slowly-growing economy. The report also comes on top of a raft of recent studies of wealth trends around the world from the likes of RBC Wealth Management/Capgemini, Boston Consulting Group, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Julius Baer, among others.

"Recent years have seen a transformation of the global wealth landscape. A quarter of a century ago, a large proportion of the world's wealthiest individuals owed their riches to inheritance. Today, entrepreneurship and business ownership have exploded as sources of wealth," the report said. 

Sources of wealth

Personal investments and profits from property, business sale and/or profit and inheritance were identified as the principal sources of overall wealth. In addition, most Singaporeans also prefer to save up or invest their money, rather than spending it on leisure activities. Saving and investing was cited as the most popular use of wealth with 61 per cent having this as their first choice, following Hong Kong at 66 per cent and Japan at 62 per cent.

Singaporean entrepreneurs and business owners surveyed made their wealth across a range of industries, with the largest bulk belonging to the industrial goods and manufacturing sector, 19 per cent, followed by consumer goods, 17 per cent, and property, 15 per cent.

The Barclays Wealth report was based on a global survey of over 2,000 high net worth individuals, comprising entrepreneurs, business leaders and investors.