Over the year to the end of April 2015, F&C Global Smaller Companies generated a 16.2% return on net assets and a 17.6% return to shareholders. Their benchmark (MSCI All Country World ex UK Small Cap Index and Numis UK Smaller Companies (excluding investment companies) Index in a 70%/30% proportion) returned 14.8%. The full year dividend was increased by more than 20% – from 8p to 9.65p – an impressive leap given the fund’s record of increasing its dividend every year for 45 years.
They break down the performance of the fund regionally as compared to local indices and we have reproduced this below.
| Fund (%) | Index (%) | |
| UK | 13.4 | 6.2 |
| USA | 16.4 | 20.7 |
| Europe | 15.5 | 4.6 |
| Japan | 36.1 | 27.1 |
| RoW | 10.1 | 20.8 / -15.1 |
The two figures for the Rest of the World in the index column are 20.8% for the Pacific ex Japan region and -15.1% for Latin America.
The manager’s report didn’t make it into the results announcement for some reason but we guess there will be one in the annual report when that is published.
FCS : Big dividend leap for F&C Global Smallers