Shin Nippon investment trust manager Praveen Kumar has left Baillie Gifford following an internal review.
He managed the £313m Japanese smaller companies trust since 2015, which has gone through a bout of poor performance since 2020.
Returns are down 36.4% over the past five years while its MSCI Japan Small Cap benchmark made positive returns of 20.5%.
James Carthew, head of investment company research at QuotedData, said: “When Praveen took over, it was the best performing Japanese fund by miles, but it ran into problems quite quickly. A lot of that is due to the sentiment against growth, but not just that – there is obviously a stock selection problem too.
“It’s difficult to run money, but it has clearly not been working and I’m not surprised the board had to do something about this. It’s understandable that people got frustrated with performance.”
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Kumar will also step down as manager of Baillie Gifford’s £609m Japan trust and £128m Japanese Smaller Companies fund following the internal review.
He will be succeeded by deputy manager Brian Lum and Baillie Gifford Japanese fund manager Jared Anderson in the running of Shin Nippo and the Japanese Smaller Companies fund.
The board of Shin Nippon thanked Kumar for his “long-standing contribution” to the trust and said it “welcomes Brian Lum to his new role and Jared Anderson as deputy manager of the company’s portfolio”.