Polar Capital Regulatory News (POLR)

14 April 2016

Polar Capital Holdings plc

AUM Update

Polar Capital Holdings plc ("Polar Capital" or the "Group"), the specialist asset management group, today provides its regular quarterly update of its unaudited statement of its Assets under Management ("AUM").

Group AUM (unaudited)

Polar Capital reports that as at 31 March 2016 its AUM were $10.4bn (£7.3bn) compared to $12.3bn (£8.3bn) at the end of March 2015.

Comment

As at the end of March our AUM were £7.3bn, down almost 10% from the level reported at the end of December 2015 and down 12% from the level at the same time last year. Our financial year finished on a disappointing note with a pickup in outflows from our Japan fund following another period of difficult performance.

Prior to the introduction of Abenomics in October 2012 our Japan UCITS had outperformed its benchmark by 57% since its launch in 2001. However, since Abenomics the process that the team deploys has not been able to deliver comparable returns and indeed has underperformed the market by a considerable margin over this period.

This has been disappointing for clients and for the team. The team remain committed to their process and believe at some point the approach will once again deliver significant outperformance for those clients who have an investment horizon beyond the current extreme volatility in Japan.

Although over the last twelve months the AUM across our other funds decreased the reduction has been a product of market moves as net inflows of $240m were received into the Group's non Japan funds over the period.

The breadth of product we are seeing both inflows and interest in from clients gives us confidence that once our Japanese business stabilises, we can once again start growing our AUM and profits. Near term though the outlook for global stock markets remains highly uncertain and this will continue to have an impact on our business over the shorter term.

Polar Capital's focus on investment expertise and our structure, as well as our own recruitment efforts continue to mean we are able to attract additional teams either with assets or whose track-record is such that assets will likely follow quickly. As has recently been reported in the media, we are looking forward to welcoming the highly rated UK Value team of George Godber and Georgina Hamilton to our Group in due course. 

As a consequence of the pipeline of further recruitment activity we now have in place we are revising, for the first time in fifteen years, our targeted number of teams from 10 to 12 to a new range of 12 to 15. We have spent a number of years building up our operational support structure within Polar Capital and this now means we have the necessary resource to offer additional teams the highest level of support, whilst maintaining the culture of our Group.

Our long term performance record remains strong despite the near term challenges posed by recent global market volatility with 14 funds out of our 18 UCITS funds ahead of their benchmark since launch, net of all costs.

Even though our AUM at the end of our financial year are less than had been anticipated, our financial position is such that the Group wishes to confirm to shareholders that it would expect to maintain the dividend at last year's level.

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