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(Hanwha Asset Management) |
Seoul-based Hanwha Asset Management said Tuesday it is betting on new growth opportunities of companies dedicated to e-commerce, data infrastructure and health care by creating a fund investing in such stocks at home and abroad.
The strategy comes amid consumer concerns about face-to-face contact amid the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, which rather translates into higher demand for companies in such sectors, company officials said.
The demand stems from changes in people’s lifestyle, as a wider age spectrum of consumer began to place online delivery orders for a variety of goods such as fresh groceries, while teleconference and online classes are increasingly becoming normal due to stay-at-home policies around the world. In the meantime, the global health crisis is boosting demand for vaccines, equipment, medical devices and telemedicine services.
“The new instrument is meant to discover and buy into untact (non-face-to-face contact) opportunities across such industries,” Chengjie Piao, manager of China Equity Team at Hanwha Asset, told reporters in a teleconference.
“We aim to invest in the potential powerhouses in the post-coronavirus era.”
The new open-ended fund, called Hanwha Global Untact Fund, started raising money from retail investors from Monday. This marks the first fund the company has launched this year.
Of the total, roughly 45 percent will go to the US stocks, 25 percent will have exposure to Chinese stocks, while the remaining 30 percent will target stocks in Korea and Japan, according to Piao. The heavy exposure to US and China is attributable to their dominance in data-driven digital economy, according to Hanwha Asset.
Meanwhile, such geographical portfolio diversification will minimize the impact from the global market fluctuation while securing returns, compared with targeting single-country stocks and conventional tech-oriented companies, Piao added.
Hanwha Asset is Korea’s third-largest asset management house, overseeing 106.2 trillion won ($86.7 billion) assets such as equities, properties, derivatives and special assets.
By Son Ji-hyoung (
consnow@heraldcorp.com)
