Australia's Perpetual goes abroad with resources fund

Perpetual, an independent asset-management company in Australia with A$27 billion of assets, is extending its operations and investment capabilities overseas, with a focus on Asia ex-Japan.

After several years of preparation, it is now marketing a global resources fund. It is a market segment that is closely related to many Australian companies and is seen as a natural extension across borders, says Gemma Dooley, Sydney-based general manager of investment research and institutional business for equities.

The fund has three managers, all of whom have backgrounds in mining and oil industries as geologists who have worked around the world. “They’re proper miners,” Dooley says.

The team screens resources companies for things such as management quality, recurring earnings and conservative balance sheets.

Perpetual has seeded the portfolio with an initial A$20 million; firm-wide, Perpetual runs A$2 billion of assets invested in domestic resource stocks.

“This fund is part of a broader push to look at global investments,” says Dooley. The firm is currently incubating an Asia ex-Japan equities product. It has set up a sales team in London and an investment team in Dublin.

Perpetual is also keen to open an office in Singapore, for both analysts and marketers.

Earlier this year, it hired Daanish Al-Karimi as general manager for institutional sales for the Middle East, Asia and Japan. It’s a new role and he is based in Sydney. He previously worked at ING Investment Management in Dubai, at Abu Dhabi Investment Company, and at Axa Investment Management in Australia and Singapore.

Dooley also has Asia experience, having lived in Singapore for five years while working for Russell Investment Group.

“We're also finding that investors in China and the Middle East are more interested in Australian equities, separate from their Asia-Pacific strategies," Dooley says. "Australia’s a developed, transparent market for resource- and Asia-related plays.”