In 2007, financial advisory firm Global Financial Consultants decided to uproot from its home in Sydney and move the whole company to the city state of Singapore, a place that had become ripe for business opportunities.
Oxfordshire-based investment manager, Invesco Perpetual, has promoted fund managers – Tim Dickson and William Lam – to manage two of the firm’s Asian funds.
Luxembourg’s global investor base can now take advantage of the Grand Duchy’s renminbi qualified foreign institutional investor (RQFII) program, enabling them to directly invest in the Chinese capital market.
Product launches, additional local staff and Hong Kong-domiciled funds are part of the plan as Old Mutual Global Investors extends an aggressive Asia expansion, Warren Tonkinson, head of distribution, tells Fund Selector Asia.
International investors are finding the compliance around qualified foreign institutional investor (QFII) licences burdensome as they prepare to file their tax returns before the July deadline.
If the manager is freed from the benchmark, emerging markets offer many opportunities from a stock-picker’s perspective, particularly if headlines are negative, according to Ross Teverson, head of strategy for global emerging markets at Jupiter Asset Management.
BlackRock has appointed Yoshiyuki Izawa as chairman and country head of Japan.
If China’s A-shares are included in world indices after a review in June, large amounts of capital could flow into the mainland market, said Catherine Yeung, investment director at Fidelity Investments.
Contrary to concerns from an association of IFAs which claimed regulatory reforms in Hong Kong will cause “collateral damage”, one expert has argued these changes are “long overdue” and the industry will eventually recover.
The huge surge in money flowing into Hong Kong stocks, which pushed the Hang Seng Index up to a seven-year high earlier this month, has been linked to a recent change in the Stock Connect initiative. But fund managers said the change was only a catalyst for the influx in funds.
Old Mutual Global Investors said its Asian equities team has received regulatory approval to operate from their Hong Kong office, marking the first time the business will have on the ground fund management capabilities in Asia.
The chairman of Hong Kong’s Independent Financial Advisors Association has said the industry will suffer “collateral damage” in the first half of 2015 due to the over-ambitious time frame of regulatory reforms.
