Schroder Asia Pacific says, during the year ended 30 September 2015, the Company’s net asset value produced a negative total return of 3.3%, again outperforming its benchmark, the MSCI All Countries Asia ex. Japan Index, which produced a negative total return of 6.0% over the same period. There will be a dividend of 4.2p. The discount widened from 9.8% to 12.7%.
On the discount, the Board continues to believe that it is not necessarily in the best interests of shareholders as a whole to adopt a rigid discount control mechanism that seeks to target a defined maximum discount level regardless of market conditions. Instead the Board continues to follow a more flexible strategy that takes into account the level of discount at which the Company’s peer group trades as well as the absolute level of its own discount and prevailing market conditions.
The manager’s statement has the following brief comment on the drivers of performance (which makes no mention of any individual holding). “The Company’s relative outperformance was due to both stock selection and country positioning. In terms of stock selection the major contributions to added value came from India, Taiwan (where our focus on information technology stocks helped) and Korea. In terms of country positioning, the key contributions came from the nil weight in Malaysia, the under weightings in Indonesia, Korea, and Singapore and the over weighting of India and Hong Kong. Detractors to relative performance included stock selection in, and the underweighting of, China and the overweight in Thailand.”
SDP : Schroder Asia Pacific will not adopt rigid discount control policy