Absolutely
And the situation is very unlikely to change.
HKEx is a quasi-government organisation, managed like a very typical civil service department, with no commercial outlook whatsover. Their AMS platform for tradng stock is the worst-performing platform in Asia, the latency and throughput is shocking. Vested interests in the local broker community will make sure it remains that way also, so they don't have to compete. HKEx has an extremely bureacratic approach to anything they do, note the ridiculous testing schedule and paperwork required for the current AMS 3.8 upgrade - a very trivial upgrade.
The trading community in HK is hoping the Chinese government will eventually realise the current HKEx management are holding back the development of HK and will allow a more forward-looking and commercial exchange such as SGX to buy HKEx. For now you can forget about HFT trading in HK.