InvestmentExpertise

About Aberdeen

At Aberdeen, asset management is our business

What makes us different?

We're known for our investment expertise and customer focus.

• We are a pure asset management company, only managing assets for third parties, this means we can focus solely on our customers' needs.
• We take a predominantly long-only approach. We aim to grow our clients' assets based on fundamentally sound investments, and avoiding market fads.
• Our processes and portfolios are transparent to our clients - they trust in what we're doing because they understand it.

We manage £193.6 billion* of third party assets from our offices around the world, across the four asset classes:

• Equities
• Fixed income
• Property
• Alternatives

We have:

• 2,000 staff
• 25 countries

Global reach, local understanding

We invest worldwide. Our teams are locally based, investing in the markets and regions where they are. This gives us an understanding of global markets from the local level upwards.

Our teams champion original thinking and knowledge, and we base our investment decisions solely on our own research.

As a group, we're large enough to cover the world's financial markets; but our teams' focused approach allows us to keep a close eye on each and every portfolio we manage.

* Source: Aberdeen Asset Managers Limited, as at 31 December 2013

Equities

• Bottom-up investment style, emphasising company fundamentals
• Team approach, with asset managers based in the regions where we invest
• Low portfolio turnover, buying stocks and holding them for the long term
• First-hand research is central to our process
• No investment without interviewing the company’s management first

Aberdeen’s mainstream equity process dates from the early 1990s and we believe its advantage lies in the consistency of its approach, irrespective of market conditions.

From the company visits and analysis carried out regionally, through to portfolio construction decisions, we adopt a team approach.

Cross-coverage of securities locally ensures objectivity; we avoid cultivating ‘star’ managers. Diversification at the stock level is our main control of risk. We aim to add value by capitalising on original research and in avoiding fashions. We see equity risk in terms of investing in a poor quality company, or overpaying for a good one.

The Aberdeen equity investment process

Active management

We aim to add value by identifying good quality stocks, defined chiefly in terms of management and business model, which are attractively priced. Good stockpicking is the key to our performance. We downplay benchmarks in portfolio construction since these provide little clue to future performance. Our asset managers avoid businesses that we do not understand or those with discriminatory shareholder structures.

Proprietary research

Our mainstream equity managers always visit companies before investing, making thousands of visits annually to existing and prospective holdings. Every contact is documented in detail. If a security fails our screens, we will not own it, irrespective of its index weight.

Long-term focus

Our mainstream strategies are simple; we buy and hold, add on price dips and take profits on price rises. This reduces transaction costs and keeps portfolios focused. We rarely pursue short-term returns for mainstream equity strategies, albeit for specialist portfolios, activity may be more dynamic.

Team approach

We employ over 100 equity investment professionals globally. Portfolio decisions are made collectively, and we avoid cultivating ‘star’ fund managers. Cross-coverage of securities also increases objectivity

Fixed Income

Introducing our fixed income process

We've used the same process for fixed income management since the 1980s. At its core is a focus on proprietary research, identifying opportunities that have an attractive balance of risks and rewards, and combining different and uncorrelated investment opportunities.

Key ingredients in our process

• Active management, operating globally, aiming to deliver outperformance
• Using diversified sources of added value to improves the risk-return profile
• Specialist decision makers, working within allocated risk budgets.
• Local presence in London, Philadelphia, Singapore, Sydney, Bangkok, Tokyo and Budapest
• Strong derivatives capability for both active and liability management

Our fixed income investment process

Fixed income key values

Active management

We give our client added value by exploiting market inefficiencies in interest rates, currency, investment grade credit, emerging market debt and high yield.

We have dedicated portfolio managers and analysts in the three main time zones. They operate as close-knit teams, delegating investment decision-making to specialists depending on their knowledge and expertise.

Team Approach

There are more than 156 investment professionals working across our international teams. They make investments according to clearly defined parameters, and work within clear reporting structures based on transparency and accountability.

Flexible and disciplined investment process

Our investment process is clear and structured. It’s also flexible – we can adapt our portfolio management for a wide variety of client requirements. For example, one client might need strategies which employ multiple sources of uncorrelated returns, while another might require us to focus on a particular specialist area.

Diverse solutions

Fixed income is not a static area. Many clients are moving to higher performance or core plus mandates, with others moving away from market-based indices and the use of liability driven benchmarks.

We aim to deliver superior performance across the full range of our fixed income capabilities. We also use derivatives, such as interest rate and credit default swaps, to add value and match liability exposures.

Property Investment

Tap into our property asset management expertise

We are Europe's largest pure property asset manager by assets under management and manage assets in Europe, Asia and North America.

All our investment products and services are geared towards opening up domestic and international property markets for investment. We use a rigorous investment process, along with original research and local active management, to make that happen.

Our property clients

We only deal with third party clients, mostly with a background in institutional investment (for example, life insurance and pension funds). We have a total around 300 people working in our client teams across 11 European countries, in Singapore and in the US.

Our property investment services

We offer a range of direct property, pooled funds and multi-manager property investment products for clients around the world.

Our property specialist teams

Our specialist teams have expertise across all categories of property, so we can meet our clients'' needs whether they are direct or indirect, public or private, domestic or international, real or synthetic.

We develop individual solutions with each investor, working to internationally accepted standards of accuracy and professionalism. What's more, we always deliver when we say we will.

Aberdeen Solutions

• Overview

• We aim to help our clients discover the right path to navigate an uncertain market environment
• Well-resourced team, offering alternative sources of returns and efficient risk management
• Broad skill sets, including strategic and tactical asset allocation, manager selection, portfolio construction and dynamic risk management
• Service delivery through channels that suit client needs, including pooled funds, bespoke portfolios and advisory

Aberdeen Solutions Investment Office provides in depth advice on investment strategy and portfolio construction to portfolio management teams. The team comprises over 80 investment professionals based in London, Edinburgh, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo and Philadelphia. We have strong capabilities for investing across a wide range of investments. These include multi-asset and multi-manager, pan alternative, hedge fund, property and private equity through our separate joint venture Aberdeen SVG.

 

• Our Key Values

Bespoke Asset Management

Our Key Values

Active management
We believe that clients benefit from a long term strategic vision in their portfolios, combined with the flexibility to use opportunities and mitigate risks. Our multi-asset team builds portfolios by investing in securities and funds that have been researched and selected by our specialist asset class teams in-house, while our multi-manager and fund of hedge funds teams research and invest in highly skilled third party manager funds, giving us both strategic and tactical investment tools.
Risk management
Our risk management controls are both specific to asset classes and characterized by clients’ own risk appetites, objectives and mandate constraints. While the strength of our investment decision-making process is predominantly qualitative, we draw on a number of quantitative inputs, particularly when working with hedge funds and multi-manager portfolios.
A focus on long-term investing
In multi-manager funds, we aim to add value by identifying and building strong relationships with those managers which we believe will excel at providing risk-adjusted performance. This approach mirrors our mainstream equity investment process, which is based on regular company visits with management. In multi-asset portfolios and the 'balanced' element of multi-manager products, we also employ top-down processes to aid strong portfolio construction and reduce risk.
Proprietary research
First hand research is a central tenet to Aberdeen as an investment manager, and we bring the same values to bear when working with alternative investments as we do with stock and manager selection. Our process centers on face to face due diligence, repeated investment meetings to monitor and verify decisions and a disciplined attention to risks.