The NOK547bn (e68bn) Norwegian Government Petroleum Fund (Petroleumsfondet) has appointed a raft of nine new managers to small and mid cap and sector driven equity mandates.
Agreements have been reached with four external managers to run portfolios of small and medium-sized companies with the mandate winners as follows. Deutsche Asset Management and Sparx Asset Management will run mandates in Japan, while Handelsbanken has been given a similar brief in the Nordic countries (excluding Norway).
Merrill Lynch Investment Managers scoops the European excluding the UK and Nordic countries. External equity managers have also received mandates for active management of equities in specific sectors; financials, health and pharmaceuticals, IT and telecommunications.
The managers are Crédit Agricole Asset Management, Citicorp Asset Management, Franklin Advisors, Dresdner RCM and Wellington Management Company.
The exact sizes of the portfolios have yet to be announced and the fund says that more mandates will be allocated in the time ahead.
At the time of the initial tender, the fund said that some $750m (e875m) had been put aside for the mandates.
Yngve Slyngstad, head of equities at Norges Bank Investment Management – the manager of the petroleum fund assets, told IPE: “The name of the game is to have more and more specialist mandates.
“Many fund managers have currently organised their investments based on the assumption that the financial universe is divided into regional areas. Some of them have come up with good global products but that is more of an exception.”
The fund has also issued one of the world’s largest ever fixed-income RFPs seeking 14 managers for between $5-$8bn of assets (page 2)