A spokesperson for the firm said the fund was an idea it was looking into, but there was no firm decision or time frame in mind for the product.
Aberdeen already has a US-domiciled Global Small Cap Fund and a flagship, UK-domiciled World Equity Fund, which launched in 1983.
The earliest date the asset manager would look to launch a European-domiciled Small Cap Fund would be January or February, but this could be pushed back months or even as much as a year.
The company is also still deciding on where to domicile the fund and is currently reviewing choices of Luxembourg or the UK.
Aberdeen has managed the Global Small Cap Fund in the US since September 2009. Net of fees it has outperformed the MSCI World Small Cap Index over one year and year-to-date.
But once fees have been included the fund has underperformed its benchmark over both these periods.
The Aberdeen World Equity Fund outperformed its benchmark over one year, three years and five years and has top quartile performance for each of these periods.
The company’s global small cap equity strategy adopts the same process as its global equity strategy but is focused exclusively on stocks within the model portfolios produced by the regional small cap equity teams.
Regional equity teams use a bottom-up process to evaluate companies through direct visits and then compile a “buylist”, which the global equity team use to inform their decisions.
This process would be followed for a European-domiciled Global Small Cap Fund and would usually lead to a portfolio of between 40 and 60 stocks, with holdings a minimum weighting of 1% and maximum weighting of 5%.
