Christian, have you made any changes to your presence in your chosen key markets over the past year?
Amundi’s six investment centres are Paris, Tokyo, London, the US, Singapore and Hong Kong, with some fund managers also based in Malaysia under the remit of Singapore.
That has not changed in the past year. What happened is we had a very good start to the year – the first six months of 2015 were extremely good in terms of net sales, and that is throughout the region.
It was not merely one particular market that did much better than any other. Europe, our home market, did extremely well, with Asia also supporting the business together with the Middle East and Latin America. That was until the summer, and then everything happened at the same time.
How many people do you have working in distribution?
We have been adding one or two people in Europe but mainly we have been adding a few more in Asia. There are now 65 or 66 in the team. It could be 67 by the end of the year.
With the size of the team we have, we are well positioned to follow the plans we are working with, and there is no particular change in that since last year.
How is the name awareness of Amundi progressing?
This is the biggest development I have seen – that our clients have been made aware of Amundi as a European/global player. We have seen our name and brand awareness moving on hugely over the past 12 months.
That is due to the fact we have spent some money on advertising and spoken to people in the media. We have also been able to position a few products into the market that people were convinced were right for the time. We attracted some business and, together with some other factors, it became a virtuous circle, whereby things started moving in the right direction.
Can you put a figure on the amount you have spent in terms of advertising?
No, that’s internal, but there has been a slight increase rather than a decrease, and we try to put the advertising either in the markets, where we do a lot of retail business, or in the hubs, where we are very active. That means where we see a lot of activity as well.
