DENMARK - Industriens Pension, the collectively-owned retirement fund for Danish industrial workers, has awarded a $65m Japanese small cap mandate to State Street Global Advisors (SSGA).

Jan-Ole Hansen, chief financial officer at Industriens, said the scheme valued the combination of SSGA's localised investment professionals and the expertise of its team in Tokyo.

He also paid tribute to SSGA's Advanced Research Center, based in Boston and London, and the manager's levels of service.

Benoit Fally, managing director of SSGA in Brussels said: "SSGA's quantitative investment processes are ideally suited for capturing the inefficiencies of financial markets while providing consistent, predictable returns and optimising information ratios."

The DKK40bn (€5bn) scheme employs an award-winning strategy of mandates suited to regional markets styles, overlaid with a considerable tactical asset allocation remit. Thus, it employs enhanced indexing for US large caps, run separately by Invesco and Quantitative Management Associates, because it deems this market more efficient than others.

More active styles are employed for large caps in Europe and Japan, where SSGA already manages money for the scheme, and US small caps, run by AXA Rosenberg. Almost all the external managers have a strong quantitative basis in their process.

Industriens Pension has a strategic allocation of 20% to foreign equities, all externally managed. For the first 10 months of 2006, foreign equities returned 11%.