Martin Currie, the Edinburgh-based specialist equity manager, has made its Global Emerging Markets capabilities available to Australian fund investors.
The Martin Currie Global Emerging Markets Fund is a high-conviction fund holding between 40 and 60 best ideas of the investment team. The fund employs a multi-cap, bottom-up strategy with the flexibility for the managers to invest in the companies where they believe the long term growth prospects are not yet reflected in their stock price. It aims to generate long-term capital growth above the MSCI Emerging Markets index and is issued in the Australian market through EQT.
The fund is co-managed by Martin Currie’s Head of Emerging Markets, Kim Catechis together with Investment Managers Andrew Ness and Mohammed Zaidi. They are supported by a team of emerging markets specialists consisting of investment director Alastair Reynolds and investment managers Jeff Casson, James Chong, Divya Mathur, and Andrew Mathewson. The team has over 120 years’ combined experience of investing in global emerging markets and the managers are fluent in many of the emerging market languages which enables them to gain useful insights into the culture, political and economic climate of the countries they visit. They also benefit from sharing insight and analysis with our Asian equities team, our global equities team and our 17-strong sector-research team.
Kimon Kouryialas (pictured), Head of Martin Currie’s Australian and Asian business, says: “The sheer size and diversity of the emerging market universe offers opportunities in every sector and region. This brings with it unique challenges that require an in-depth understanding of these countries and a disciplined and sustainable investment process. The Martin Currie GEM team has significant experience in managing emerging market portfolios and the managers have the flexibility to diverge from the benchmark and identify the smaller and mid-cap companies with real growth potential that are not yet on the world’s radar. We feel we have a strong vehicle to meet the needs of Australian investors looking to allocate to an emerging markets strategy.”
Kim Catechis, Head of Emerging Markets at Martin Currie, says: “The emerging markets look set to be the main drivers of the world’s economic activity over the foreseeable future. Many of these countries now enjoy strong balance sheets, technically adept administration and healthy banking systems, all of which will help to deal with the prevailing uncertainty in global markets. In this context, the growth of the middle classes in these countries is a catalyst for emerging market company dominance in a wide variety of sectors. The challenge for the investor is to translate the developing world’s competitive advantage into sustainable real returns.
“Increasingly, we can expect that the next generation of global emerging market brands will rise to prominence not due to demand from the developed world, but by doing business domestically and within the developing world. Therefore, in identifying these future global success stories, we need to understand the avenues of trade between these different regions as well as indentifying companies which are well positioned to benefit from this resilient area of demand.”
The Martin Currie Global Emerging Markets Fund is launching with a superannuation fund and is available through partnership between Martin Currie and EQT.
