Companies that chose to be ‘on the frontline’ during the COVID-19 pandemic have benefitted in terms of share price, according to a portfolio manager.
Qiao Ma, portfolio manager on the Asian Equities fund at Cooper Investors, said her fund had a focus on quality companies with a value proposition and those had been the types of companies to come out well from the pandemic.
“Quality management shines through in tough times, even if the industries are cyclical ones. There were a lot of companies which went into hiding during the pandemic but the good ones were out on the frontline, they were boosting morale and they were pivoting their business models,” she said.
“The ones running to the frontline are those that are gaining market share and where we see the outperformance.”
Her top weighting was currently to consumer stocks at 27.8% followed by financials at 21.4%.
She said performance in the fund had been very company-specific and she was “proud” of how the companies in the highly-concentrated fund had performed during the period. Although it could hold as many as 70 companies, she currently had only 40 and the fund also focused on companies with strong corporate governance.
“We spend a lot of time looking at factors like environmental, social and governance (ESG) and corporate governance and won’t touch them if we don’t have confidence in their integrity,” she said.
According to FE Analytics, within the Australian Core Strategies universe, the Cooper Investors Asian Equities fund returned 3.3% over one year to 30 June, 2020, versus returns by the Asia Pacific ex Japan sector of 4.1%. Since the start of the year to 30 June, it had lost 1.8% versus sector losses of 2%.
