Lazard Asset Management has launched the Lazard International Equity Value Portfolio. The new fund is managed by the Lazard International Equity Value team, who joined LAM earlier this year.
“International equity continues to be a strategic focus for Lazard and for our US-based clients,” says John Reinsberg, Deputy Chairman and Head of Global and International Strategies at LAM. “We are pleased to be able to offer investors this highly differentiated strategy, which we believe complements our existing international equity platform of primarily relative value and quantitative strategies.”
The fund is benchmark-agnostic, investing in companies listed outside of the US across all market capitalisations. The portfolio management team seeks long-term capital appreciation by identifying companies that appear undervalued and whose valuations will benefit from potential company-specific catalysts. For example, the team may seek to invest in companies engaging in activities that have the ability to improve the companies’ fundamentals, resolve circumstances that may be negatively affecting valuation and/or improve market and investor perceptions of the companies. The Fund is concentrated and is expected to hold between 20 and 30 positions at all times.
Members of the Lazard International Equity Value team, including Mark Rooney, Erik Van Der Sande and Craig Lottner have been investing together in non-US markets since 2002. The team currently manages two private vehicles utilising the same investment philosophy – a long-only vehicle and a long-short vehicle. The Fund has been launched based on the existing long-only strategy that the team has managed since its inception in 2014.
“Our team’s pure value, catalyst-driven approach offers investors non-US exposure in a concentrated portfolio with high active share,” says Mark Rooney, portfolio manager on the Lazard International Equity Value team. “With more than ten years of growth outperformance, we’re seeing increased interest from investors ahead of what the market expects to be an upcoming cyclical shift back towards value.”
