Offshore investments rise

Source: Thetimes.co.za

More than 1.3 billion rand was invested in offshore collective investments in the December quarter ahead of the 1 billion rand inflow in the previous quarter, the Association of Collective Investments (ACI) said.

It said that this reflected a heightened interest from both institutional and retail investors.

The chief executive of ACI, Di Turpin, said that retail inflows were 803 million rand while institutions invested 500 million rand offshore.

"There has been more interest in investing offshore which is in line with the local industry figures where foreign rand denominated funds have been attracting more flows than usual. In the past quarter these foreign funds inflows were 14 percent of the total domestic figure," she said.

Turpin added that the bulk of the funds went into fixed interest investments, with 1.3 billion rand from the institutions and 394 million rand from retail investors.

She said that while retail investors channelled 246 million rand to equity funds there were outflows of some 926 million rand by institutions on profit taking.

"In the previous quarter both institutions and retail each invested just over 400 million rand for a 889 million rand total inflow into equity funds," she said, adding that the inflows into asset allocation funds were 293 million rand - as against the previous quarter’s 107 million rand outflow.

ACI figures show that nearly a net 1.5 billion rand was invested offshore last year, which was well down on 2006’s 6.9 billion rand.

Retail investors have 46.4 billion rand offshore while the institutions’ total is 61.5 billion. There were 365 foreign currency denominated funds at the end of December, compared to 343 in the previous quarter.