The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relevant to wealth advisors and their clients.

M&G Investments
With the outlook for China currently more upbeat, M&G Investments has just launched the M&G (Lux) China Fund to provide investors with access to the market, identifying attractive long-term investment opportunities. 

The fund is managed by David Perrett who has spent more than three decades investing in China and the wider region, the firm said in a statement. He is supported by Singapore-based deputy fund manager, Jamie Zhou and the wider Asia Pacific equity investment team which manages about €23.8 billion ($30.7 billion) in assets across the region.

The fund is structured as a sub-fund of a UCITS Luxembourg SICAV, and will be available to institutional and wholesale investors in Europe, as well as professional investors across Asia.

The M&G China Fund’s investment approach centres on a universe of around 300 Chinese stocks, which have been curated over years of investment research. With a focus on risk pricing, the team’s bottom-up stock picking approach use its knowledge, network of companies and contacts in the region.

“In our view, China’s stock market capitalisation is currently disproportionately small compared to the size of its economy, with many stocks trading at compelling levels of valuation,” Perrett said. “At the same time, many Chinese companies are showing improving operational resilience and are increasingly focused on maximising profits and boosting shareholder returns through both higher dividends and share buy-backs.”

“In addition to ongoing corporate self-help, many Chinese businesses are also leaders in globally growing areas such as renewable energy and digital supply-chain management. We believe our bottom-up stock picking approach, combined with rigorous risk management should enable us to deliver consistent and attractive returns for our investors."

The team manages sizable mandates, investing in Asian and Japanese equities on behalf of M&G Life’s ÂŁ128 billion With Profits Fund as well as external investors, as it seeks to diversify its geographical allocation.

The M&G (Lux) China Fund aims to provide a higher total return (capital growth plus income) net of OCF than that of the MSCI China with 100 per cent China A Share Index over any five-year period, typically holding between 5 to 80 stocks, its focus is on quality companies with strong balance sheets, sustainable cash flows and attractive valuations.

New Forests
As the appetite for investing in forestry rises, Sydney-headquartered investment manager New Forests has just entered into a partnership with Oji Holdings to establish a Future Forest Innovations Fund, a corporate forest investment fund to help it achieve its 2030 environmental goals. The partnership sees an almost $300 million investment from Oji Holdings, a manufacturer of pulp and paper, along with a co-investment from New Forests, the firm said in a statement.

Through the fund, Oji aims to invest in productive plantation forestry assets in Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America and Africa, that generates a financial return and provides climate benefits. The Future Forest Innovations Fund has been established as an open-ended, Variable Capital Company (VCC), registered in Singapore.          

Oji Holdings is already a significant investor in plantation forests globally with 635,000 hectares. Through this partnership, it seeks to invest in an additional 70,000 hectares of plantation forests, across greenfield and brownfield assets in the four main regions.

New Forests said it will draw upon its 20-year history of managing forests sustainably for financial, environmental and community impacts, while focusing on improving genetics, implementing leading information and analytics systems, and advanced application of geo-spatial data across forestry assets.

“We are continuing to see momentum and interest from corporates looking to invest in forestry and the natural capital asset class. By investing in sustainable forest plantations in four major regions of the world, we will be assisting Oji to achieve their 2030 mission of growing their sustainable forestry assets and reducing overall carbon emissions,” Mark Rogers, chief executive officer of New Forests, said.

“Through the operation of this fund, we will combine the diverse expertise of New Forests, an expert in forest management, with our own forest management technologies. We aim to develop products that use wood resources and contribute to the realisation of a sustainable society,” Oji added.

New Forests is a global investment manager of nature-based real assets and natural capital strategies, managing a diversified portfolio of sustainable timber plantations and conservation areas, carbon and conservation finance projects, agriculture, timber processing and infrastructure. Headquartered in Sydney, it operates in Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Africa and the United States.