Magellan Financial Group has seen flat net institutional flows for the first time in year.
In a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), the asset manager said total funds under management fell slightly from $42.7 billion to $41.4 billion in the month to 31 May.
However, it noted that institutional outflows were flat compared to outflows of $2 billion in the prior month.
This was the first time in a year that the firm had not reported institutional outflows with the largest volume having been seen in September 2022 when it lost $3.2 billion due to the liquidity requirements of a client impacted by global market volatility.
The 3 per cent decrease in monthly FUM compared to a decline of 1.1 per cent in the previous month as it reported net retail outflows of $0.5 billion.
Breaking it down by asset class, Australian equities saw a far more modest decline of 2 per cent compared to a decrease of 25 per cent in the previous month and a drop of a third in March.
Australian equities fell from $4.5 billion to $4.4 billion.
Infrastructure equities saw the largest decline of 4 per cent from $17.3 billion to $16.6 billion and global equities fell by 2.3 per cent from $20.9 billion to $20.4 billion.
However, while the outflows were small, they compared to increases for both asset classes in April.
Last month, Magellan chief executive, David George, spoke to Money Management about how he is rebuilding the company and hoping to grow assets back to $100 billion.
This included creating an environment that is collaborative and encourages staff to speak up.
“We did make a few adjustments,” George said. “We made what was already there work better, rather than change what was there or change people. So, first and foremost, get as much focus as we could onto the existing strategies, making sure we had idea generation working well.
“Like a lot of businesses, particularly ones that had been as successful, you become bigger and you become more complicated. It’s just really simplifying that focus to make sure that it had less entrepreneurial attachments and more focus on really making sure that we got the core bread-and-butter, sticking-to-our-knitting work.”
