Scottish Oriental Smaller Companies has published results for the year ended 31 August 2015. Over that period it outperformed the MSCI AC Asia ex Japan Index and MSCI AC Asia ex Japan Small Cap Index, returning -8.4% against -9.1% and -9.4% for the indices respectively. The dividend was maintained at 11.5p – the Board say it remains their present intention to maintain at least this level of dividend, using revenue reserves if necessary . The discount widened though and the return to shareholders was -13.8%.
One thing we didn’t report earlier is that, in March 2015 First State announced it would slit its business into two teams; one primarily based in Hong Kong and the other in Edinburgh. They said there would be no change to the teams’ investment philosophy and process. The team in Edinburgh becomes Stewart Investors. Stewart Investors will continue to have a number of colleagues based in Singapore, London and in the near future, Sydney. The FSS Asia team will be primarily based in Hong Kong, with colleagues also working out of Singapore and Edinburgh. SST is managed by Wee-Li Hee, who is part of the FSS Asia team, supported by Scott McNab and Martin Lau.
The manager thought Scottish Oriental’s performance over the year was disappointing. The Trust suffered from its high weighting in Singapore where the market has been weak. Stock selection in Singapore further hindered performance, with Ezion adversely impacted by the falling oil price and Petra Foods’ key operations in Indonesia being affected by poor consumer sentiment in that country.
SST : Scottish Oriental manager disappointed despite beating benchmark