Xinhua Lehman China Aggregate Index was launched in the first quarter of 2004, an unprecedented collaboration between Xinhua Finance and another innovator in global finance - Lehman Brothers (www.lehman.com). The alliance unites Lehman Brothers' track record of excellence and thirty-plus years of index construction expertise with Xinhua Finance's exhaustive China databases and accurate pricing sources. The Index is a co-branded component of Lehman's Global Family of Indices, which provides comprehensive performance and risk measurements for all major bond markets and are used by over 90% of U.S. investors, a majority of European investors and a growing share of Asian investors.
Investors, consultants, plan sponsors, and issuers use this index because of its integrity and transparency, its unbiased, rules-based methodology for determining index constituency, and its timely and reliable data-delivery platform. By licensing this Index, clients receive current and historical index returns as well as statistics data for all of the indices and sub-indices in the benchmark database. The series, which consisted of 224 securities with a total market value of RMB 3.3 trillion as of February 2006, includes a Treasury Index, Government-Related Index, and Corporate Index, which are further categorized by sector (industrial, utility and financial). To qualify for index inclusion all constituents must be RMB-denominated fixed-rate instruments with at least one year to maturity.