“You certainly don’t get the same bemused reaction you used to when you say you’re based in Sydney,” Series says. The regional mandates managed here can now be measured in the billions rather than millions, with AMP Capital Investors, Maple-Brown Abbott, MIR, Pengana, Perennial, Platinum and the aforementioned Treasury Asia Asset Management all Sydney managers that have attracted money for some iteration of an Asia-Pacific equity strategy. Perpetual Investments wants in too, last month poaching Rosemary Tan, an analyst with Platinum’s Asia fund, for its own regional equities strategy which it has seeded with $10 million. Add to all that a robust community of sell-side analysts covering stocks in the region, and Series says these days you’ll get the chief financial officer or higher of an Asian company coming through town on a roadshow at least once or twice a week. Between such visits and the necessity of regular trips to the region – Series thinks you don’t need to be on the ground in investee countries, but you do have to know how to deal with jetlag – most of Sydney’s Asia-Pacific managers claim they strike a balance between access, and sobering separation from Asia’s notorious “hot money” centres, be they traditional [Hong Kong] or emerging [Shanghai].

However, there’s one of those headwinds that remain almost as prevalent today as it did when Series and Crivelli hung that Pacific Road shingle all those years ago. Most of the mandates referred to above have come from foreign institutions, with a handful only of domestic funds looking beyond the traditional approach of Australian equities and international equities, with an emerging markets extension if they had the scale. Is ‘emerging markets’ good enough? The typical Australian institutional investor’s exposure to Asian equities is either through a “discretion” afforded one or two of their global equity managers, or else a specialist mandate benchmarked to the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. “Our clients that want to be a bit more aggressive on the growth side will have a specialist tilt to Asia, but to be honest most of them are happy to access it through a GEMS [global emerging markets] extension,” says John Coombe, executive director at JANA Investment Advisers.

“People say you need a specialist to access the companies doing consumer goods and services that will benefit from the rise of the Asian middle class, but what’s to say the ‘upstream’ parts of the market are where you make the money? Those goods and services are competing in a world that’s pretty tight at the moment – I wouldn’t assume the guys up there are making better margins than the resource producers down here.” That’s where you’re wrong, John, comes the chorus from the Asian equity managers. The head of Asian equities at AMP Capital Investors, Karma Wilson, says many of her favourite companies in the region are not so much competing head-to-head as cracking open entire new mass markets. “I look at something like the Punjab National Bank: it wouldn’t even be in the first universe a global equity manager filters. But it’s forecasting an expansion of its customer base from 40 million to 150 million over the next five years. It’s big on biometric banking, where India’s rural semi-literate and illiterate will be able to open an account using their thumbprint, and then use that to operate a biometric ATM.