Pension fund Mediahuis Netherlands (Mhpf) insists it is sticking with active management for almost all of its equities portfolio, despite the rising cost of its asset management, disappointing results on its US stocks – and an industry trend to embrace passive investment.
The €1.2bn scheme of the Dutch publishing company manages around 95% of its total portfolio actively – the highest percentage within a peer group of 162 pension funds, where the median stands at 49%, IPE’s sister publication Pensioen Pro reports, citing the pension fund’s recently published 2025 annual report.
In recent years, many Dutch pension funds – such as the pension fund of investment firm HAL (the owner of IPE) and Provisum, the pension fund of clothing company C&A – have decided to reduce their active investing or abandon it altogether.
Asked whether Mhpf was still comfortable with such a high degree of active management, Frank Huitema, interim director and chief investment officer of the corporate pension fund, told Pensioen Pro: “Yes, we remain proponents of active investing.”
However, he admitted it was becoming more difficult for active managers to beat the benchmark in certain markets, particularly due to high concentration.
“We see this in emerging markets, where a great deal depends on the manager’s positioning regarding TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, and in the US, where much hinges on the right positioning in tech giants Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft,” he said.
“We are therefore increasingly looking at market and sector concentrations,” Huitema told Pensioen Pro.
The pension fund said in its annual report that two managers of its emerging markets equity portfolio had delivered solid outperformance last year, thanks to overweighting South Korea and underweighting China.
Of its three active managers for developed markets, the two European equities managers also beat the benchmark, helped by large positions in the defence sector, though by narrower margins than for emerging markets, Pensioen Pro reported.
However, the performance of Mhpf’s US equities manager had been “very disappointing”, and was set to be reviewed in the spring of 2026, the pension fund noted.
Huitema told Pensioen Pro that a review had taken longer than anticipated and would be concluded by the end of the summer, but said active management had clearly added value in both emerging and developed markets in 2025.
The equity portfolio as a whole returned 15.8% last year – above the benchmark gain of 12.5%, Pensioen Pro reported.
However, the pension fund stated in its annual report that its asset management costs – averaging 0.45% between 2022 and 2024 – were significantly higher than the 0.32% median of its peer group, citing Mhpf’s deliberate choice to invest actively as “one possible explanation for this difference”.
“While this is more expensive than passive investing, we are convinced it yields better long-term returns,” the pension fund said.
