UniSuper has invested more than $200 million in a second mandate focused on global technology stocks as it searches for alpha in equity markets worldwide.
The $28 billion industry fund awarded the latest global technology mandate to RCM, and was also close to signing a further mandate with a manager focused on global small-cap IT stocks, confirmed head of equities Simon Hudson.
The RCM mandate followed the fund’s allocation of $300 million to a T. Rowe Price global technology fund in February this year. Both are global, broad-cap equity mandates but will inevitably favour the leading technology industries of the US.
“The industry is obviously dominated by the US, but increasingly there is more innovation in Asia, which is also becoming a large and competitive consumer market in this space,” Hudson said.
Last year, after indexing the bulk of its developed markets global equities portfolio, UniSuper identified global technology as an area of active management that could complement this large passive core.
RCM portfolio managers Walter Price and Huachen Chen, who are based in San Franciso, are managing the mandate and have been running money together at the firm for more than 25 years, Hudson said.
“To say they’ve been through a few technology cycles would be an understatement.”
Hudson noted that one of the major shifts underway in the technology sector was the contest in consumer computing and enterprise computing, which was evident in mobile devices specialist Apple’s moves to take on Microsoft in the business computing market, where it has long been dominant.
