Asia's Top Money Managers
"We're in the right place at the right time," says Lau Wing Tat, chief investment officer of DBS Asset Management in Singapore, which reports 10.3 billion Singapore dollars ($6.3 billion) in Asian assets. "We have every confidence that asset management in Asia has enormous potential."
Like Wing Tat, most Asian money managers are a remarkably confident and cheerful bunch these days, buoyed by the region's generally growing economies, strong stock markets and steady asset inflows. With the exception of Taiwan, all Asian equity markets are up this year in local-currency terms. South Korea and India posted gains through late August of 21.2 percent and 13.0 percent, respectively. The MSCI Asia-Pacific ex-Japan index was up 9.7 percent, versus a 0.19 percent loss for the Standard & Poor's 500 index. Analysts expect this to be the fifth consecutive year that the index outperforms the S&P 500. As for Japan, the Nikkei 225 index hit a four-year high on August 24.
The assets of the Asia 100, Institutional Investor's annual ranking of the region's biggest money managers, increased from $7.4 trillion at the end of 2003 to $7.7 trillion at the end of 2004, a 4 percent gain. The rise, fueled by robust gains in the volume of assets devoted to China (a 31 percent increase), South Korea (24 percent) and India (20 percent), would have been even greater if not for a 1.4 percent decline in the assets of the top 25 investment managers in Japan, which account for 61 percent of the Asia 100's total.
How the rankings were compiled Institutional Investor's 11th annual ranking of Asia's largest institutional investors includes banks, insurance companies, pension funds, independent fund managers and firms domiciled in 12 Asian countries, as well as 20 international managers with significant investments in the region, though their assets are not necessarily managed in Asia. Subsidiaries with substantial assets under management have generally been listed separately.
New York–based Senior Associate Editor Tucker Ewing, with the assistance of Researchers Katsuko Usami in Japan and Winston Chan in Hong Kong and Contributing Editor Donald Kirk in South Korea, compiled the rankings from a variety of sources, including questionnaires filled out by the institutions themselves. II refined this data through follow-up faxes, e-mails and telephone calls. Researchers also culled information from annual reports, company Web sites, local regulatory agencies and other public sources. When official data were unavailable, II obtained figures from actuaries, brokerages and consulting firms. Estimates, which are footnoted, account for the remaining numbers. When possible, figures are broken into regional and asset categories.
II seeks to present numbers that are as comparable as possible, given the different levels of disclosure and varying accounting practices in use across Asia. Inevitably, there is double counting of assets in some countries because of the lack of disclosure standards and the variety of sources needed to reach an approximate total for some money managers.
Because of currency conversion and rounding, breakdown figures may not add up to the sum of total assets. All figures are in millions of dollars and are as of December 31, 2004, unless otherwise noted. Figures were converted to dollars using year-end 2004 exchange rates. For Japan and South Korea, all figures and exchange rates are as of March 31, 2005, unless otherwise noted.