It will sit alongside its £230m Asian Smaller Companies Investment Trust run by the company’s Asian equities team.
The new emerging markets trust, a first for UK investors, will target up to £150m in gross proceeds and will be managed by Aberdeen’s 35-strong emerging markets equity team that includes head of global emerging markets Devan Kaloo and Mark Gordon-James as a senior investment manager.
Its aim is to provide long-term capital growth through investment in a diversified portfolio of listed emerging market smaller companies. The Asian trust invests in companies with a market cap of up to $750m.
The investment universe is close to 2,000 companies in the MSCI EM Smaller Companies Index and others besides.
In 2007, Aberdeen launched its Luxembourg-domiciled Global Emerging Markets Smaller Companies Fund, a dollar-denominated fund that now has nearly $1bn in assets.
Devan Kaloo, head of global emerging markets at Aberdeen, comments: “The emerging market small cap sector offers many high quality companies with robust growth prospects within it. As an added benefit, many of these companies are domestic-oriented, allowing investment managers to receive a high degree of exposure to rising emerging market domestic demand.”
The trust will be listed on the London Stock Exchange with the public offer and prospectus expected to be available from early June 2011.
The charges include a performance fee capped at 15% of any benchmark out-performance on top of a 1% annual management charge and an administration fee of $100,000 per annum.
