The number of people with more than one million U.S. dollars to invest, not including the value of their homes or consumable goods, increased by 14.7 percent to 13.7 million last year, according to a report released by two wealth management and advisory bodies last Thursday.

The report was put together by consultancy firm Capgemini and the Royal Bank of Canada's (RBC) wealth management division. The number means that about two million people joined the ranks of the global high net worth individuals last year. 70 percent of them are from the United States, Japan, Germany and China, the report said.

The total global investable wealth owned by the rich increased by 13.8 percent to 52.62 trillion U.S. dollars.

According to the report, the number of millionaires on the Chinese mainland increased by 17.8 percent last year to 758 thousand, while the number rose from 114 thousand to 124 thousand in Hong Kong, and from 95 thousand to 112 thousand in Taiwan. Claire Sauvanaud, vice president of Capgemini Financial Sercices, told a press conference in Singapore that although China's economic growth has slowed down, it has not stalled.

The number of high net worth individuals in the Asia-Pacific region increased by 18.2 percent last year, while in North America, Middle East, and Europe, the numbers were 17.1 percent, 16.7 percent, and 13.7 percent respectively. The number of wealthy people in Africa increased by 7.3 percent last year, and in Latin America the number was 2.1 percent.

The report predicted that the total investable wealth owned by the global rich would continue to rise at an average annual growth rate of 6.9 percent from 2014 to 2016, to about 64.3 trillion U.S. dollars. Investment will be increasingly internationalized, the report pointed out.

Today, the investment behavior of high net worth individuals is already increasingly globalized. These people are more dependent on new communication methods like the Internet to manage their assets.

The article is edited and translated from 《全球百万富翁去年增加14.7%》， source: Economic Information, author: Chen Jipeng.