Coronation still (just) SA’s biggest fund manager

The company built its assets under management from R99 billion in September 2012, to R244 billion at the end of last year.

During this time of expansion it surpassed Allan Gray as the largest asset manager in the country. It also took its market share to 12%.

However, this trend has recently slowed. With Coronation having closed its South African institutional equity and multi asset portfolios to new investors, it has not been attracting the big inflows of previous years.

Between the end of March 2015 and the end of March this year, the company’s assets under management actually dropped by just under R2 billion. At the same time, Allan Gray added more than R16.5 billion to its books.

The table below reflects the changes in the assets under management over the past year in the collective investment schemes run by South Africa’s ten largest asset management companies.

Coronation’s decline may be only marginal, but against the gains made by some of the other managers it is significant. Stanlib was the only other one of the top ten managers to show a drop in its assets under management.

In percentage terms, the largest gains were shown by Foord and Nedgroup Investments. In nominal terms, Allan Gray, Investec and Nedgroup Investments all added just over R16 billion.

These numbers however don’t only reflect inflows as they also take into account changes in the value of the investments themselves. The table below shows the net sales made by these same ten managers over the last four quarters.

This is a very short term view, but it appears to show a trend of accelerating outflows from Coronation’s funds. This is something that the company will want to stabilise.

It’s also telling that Allan Gray actually saw larger outflows than Coronation over the year. The gains in its assets under management were therefore due to significantly better performance.

The largest outflows were from Stanlib, with a particularly large drop in early 2015. It is interesting that all three of the largest managers actually attracted less new money than was withdrawn from their funds over this period.

The only two managers who showed consistent net inflows over the entire year were Sanlam and Foord. Sanlam was, overall, also the largest gainer in nominal terms with Investec’s strong first quarter this year placing it second. It showed the largest net sales of any asset manager for this three month period.