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Martin Currie Global dips into reserves to grow dividend

Martin Currie Global Portfolio results for the year ended 31 January 2015 have been released. They show the fund underperforming its benchmark, the FTSE World Index, a bit in net asset value terms – returning 16.1% vs. 17.3% – but marginally outperforming in share price terms – +17.4%.The dividend was increased from 4p to 4.1p but this was uncovered once again as revenue increased from 3.8p to 3.9p.

The Chairman says the fund’s returns were good enough to put it into the top quartile of competing funds.

The manager says he did not foresee the collapse in the oil price and the stocks that underperformed in the second half of the year included a number of energy and resource companies. Their two Japanese financial stocks, Orix and Mitsubishi UFJ did poorly, despite reasonable operational results.

Amongst the positives were the holding in L Brands (known better in the High Street as Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Bodyworks). This was the top contributor, growing strongly in its home market of the US and increasingly internationally. Apple was the next best contributor – the iPhone 6 is its latest success story. The manager says perhaps unsurprisingly, given the outperformance of that country, nine of the top 10 contributors were US-based, the one that was not was UK-based life insurance and financial services multinational, Prudential, which operates in Asia, America and the UK and has enjoyed good growth in all three regions.

MNP : Martin Currie Global dips into reserves to grow dividend

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