The Ashmore Sicav Turkish Equity Fund is an open-ended vehicle primarily invested in Turkish equities and equity related instruments issued by corporates and quasi-sovereigns.
Christoph Hoffmann, Ashmore’s global head of distribution, said it was important to put the fund’s launch in the context of the company’s wider distribution efforts.
“The existing fund was domiciled in British Virgin Islands and was launched in 2003. Now as part of a broader effort to make our funds more available we have decided to make it Ucits Luxembourg. For some of our products it made sense just to re-domicile them. For this one it was easier to close down the old fund and re-launch it as a Sicav,” he said.
Ashmore now has 21 Luxembourg-domiciled products in what Hoffmann said was an on-going effort.
“European investors find Ucits vehicles easy to access: they have daily dealing and liquidity and are able to offer different share classes, currencies and pricing for retail and institutional investors,” he explained.
“We did not launch the fund because we think it [the market] is very good at this point in time, but we wanted to seamlessly convert our track record and shareholders from the old fun into the new,” Hoffmann added.
The Turkish stock market is down more than 25% since the start of the year and the Turkish lira has fallen more than 14% over the same period.
Ashmore’s Turkish investment committee on the ground in Istanbul continue to manage the strategy, using the same bottom-up stockpicking process.
