Last week the local funds management industry got a wake-up call; this week NZ share managers have 600 million more positive reasons to get out of bed.
Courtesy of AMP Capital, two NZ share mandates worth approximately $350 million and $260 million apiece are up for tender with most local managers having a crack at either, or both.
The $260 million job - a New Zealand Super Fund (NZS) mission to replace the NZ shares pool managed by AMP Capital until last November - could be a mirage, but the figure itself is accurate. Conversely, the AMP Capital mandate, put out to the market after the company dissolved its in-house NZ shares team in December 2014, is a sure thing (a winner could be revealed as early as this week) but the $350 million amount is more of an educated guess than an established fact.
Less the NZS money, AMP Capital managed about $700 million of local shares as at late 2014. Allowing for further client attrition and AMP probably retaining management of some NZ share investments from associated entities (for example, AMP Life NZ last reported about $100 million in local equities invested via AMP Capital's active NZ equities funds), the final sum offered out to external management will undoubtedly be less than $700 million: about half, according to my somewhat reliable sources.
But even $350 million equates to one of the biggest wholesale NZ shares management jobs on offer ever. And combined with the NZS money, that represents a significant amount of loose change floating around the industry.
