IRVING, Texas – February 24, 2025 – American Beacon Advisors, Inc. (“American Beacon”), an experienced provider of investment advisory services to institutional and retail markets, announced today that it has assumed management of the Ninety One Emerging Markets Equity Fund with Ninety One North America, Inc. (“Ninety One”) assuming the sub-advisor role. Effective February 21, 2025, American Beacon will serve as the investment advisor and Ninety One will serve as sub-advisor to the newly adopted fund: American Beacon Ninety One Emerging Markets Equity Fund; R5 Class: ZEMIX; R6 Class: ZEMRX; Y Class: ZEMAX (“the Fund”).
The Fund’s transition marks another significant achievement in the partnership between American Beacon and Ninety One. Following a year of collaboration and groundwork, highlighted by the successful adoption of Ninety One’s Global Franchise and International Franchise funds in November 2024, the Fund rounds out American Beacon’s Ninety One offerings, contributing to a comprehensive suite of investment solutions.
Greg Stumm, president and CEO of Resolute Investment Managers and American Beacon, said: “We believe Ninety One has a unique perspective on emerging markets and recognize the need investors have for a dedicated solution in the emerging-markets space. The yearlong foundation established between our groups makes this adoption a natural next step. We look forward to raising awareness about the opportunities emerging markets presents to our clients.”
The Fund, which is managed by Ninety One’s Varun Laijawalla and Archie Hart, co-emerging markets equity portfolio managers, is a core solution designed to exploit the opportunities in emerging markets and generate alpha across emerging-market cycles. A high-conviction fund, it aims to achieve consistent, long-term capital growth by actively investing in a diversified portfolio, using a style-agnostic, fundamental approach to access high-conviction, bottom-up opportunities. The Fund focuses on value, quality, operating momentum and investor attention to evaluate emerging-market companies. By combining deep, fundamental research with data-driven insights from Ninety One’s proprietary alpha model, the Fund seeks to exploit pricing anomalies driven by behavioral biases with the view of delivering consistent, long-term, risk-adjusted performance.
Richard Garland, managing director and head of the Global Advisor Business at Ninety One, said: “Emerging markets generate 58% of global GDP yet make up only 9% of equity portfolios1. As a global investment manager with deep roots in emerging markets, Ninety One offers a distinct perspective, empowering clients to unlock long-term value within this asset class. Through our strategic partnership with American Beacon, we can continue to expand our U.S. footprint through their distribution network and deliver comprehensive, long-term solutions to meet investors’ needs.”
Varun Laijawalla, the Fund’s co-portfolio manager at Ninety One, said: “Emerging-market assets are typically under-represented in investors’ portfolios, yet they are home to a diverse range of growing economies and companies, and are increasingly important for investor portfolios. Moreover, emerging markets can help to diversify against the highly concentrated U.S. equity market within a global-equity allocation, and at an attractive price.”
For more information about the Fund, visit www.americanbeaconadvisors.com
1 Sources: Population and GDP breakdown are from the IMF; equity ownership is based on allocations tracked by Broadridge (as at Q3 2023).