The Hong Kong grouper has a limited distribution that coincides with the heavily fished inshore areas of Japan, Taiwan, Republic of Korea and southern China.

The Hong Kong grouper is the most expensive of all the Epinephelus groupers in Hong Kong. It is known from anecdotal accounts that the abundance of this fish has declined considerably from the 1960s to late 1990s in Hong Kong waters (see Sadovy and Cornish 2000).

Moreover, supply of Hong Kong grouper seed (i.e., the fry and fingerlings), which was the favoured species for mariculture in southern China, is known to have significantly decreased in abundance (the small fish are taken from the wild and then are grown up to market size in captivity). For example, the seed was abundant in Fujian (a province of mainland China) waters in the early 1980s but was very rare by 1994 (Sadovy 2000). In 1979, Hong Kong culturists purchased, for grow-out, at least 180,000 kg of this species (200,000-450,000 fish of 100-200 g) that had been wild-caught from southern China, today seed of this species from China is rare (Sadovy 2000). It was reported that Hong Kong grouper landings could not keep up with demand by the late 1970s and that prices had risen from HK$ 33-50/kg in 1978 to HK$ 50-70/kg in 1979 as a result (Tseng and Ho 1988). Juveniles are no longer readily available from Hong Kong either (Sadovy and Cornish 2000).