Lazard Emerging Markets Eq A Acc GBP

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|11/12/2024

by Chris Tate
Lazard Emerging Markets Equity deserves praise for its accomplished team and time-tested approach.

Lazard’s emerging-markets capabilities are a strength. Lead manager and emerging-markets veteran James Donald took charge of the strategy in 2001. Though he isn’t getting any younger, Donald has added three comanagers—Rohit Chopra, Monika Shrestha, and Ganesh Ramachandran—over the years to help this cohesive team endure beyond his presence. Their four dedicated research analysts have a minimum of 26 years in the industry and 13 years at the firm. The team of eight dedicated to this strategy also leverages Lazard’s platform of roughly 55 emerging-markets investment professionals to help scour the ranging universe for mispriced stocks. This team demonstrates impressive ability in emerging markets and great continuity in its management and analyst ranks.

The team’s bold but patient relative value approach sets it apart. It aims to find firms with above-average returns on equity selling at below-average prices, paying close attention to management quality. The strategy generally invests in 70 to 90 stocks that meet their profitability requirements. Valuation discipline is consistently on display here; if Donald and team can’t find companies at the low price they demand, they’re willing to wait and won’t bite on stocks at higher valuations that the market has bid up. Case in point, the managers avoided Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Tencent in 2020 to the detriment of performance as their stock prices soared. But true to the managers’ contrarian nature, they purchased these former market darlings in late 2023 after their stocks fell precipitously, then moved slightly overweight in China in September 2024 for the first time in a dozen years.

This patience has paid off for investors since Donald joined as a lead manager. Following a tough stretch for much of the second half of the 2010s, the US-domiciled institutional share class’ 3.2% annualized return over the 2021 to 2023 calendar years was 8.2 and 3.2 percentage points better than the MSCI Emerging Markets and MSCI Emerging Markets Value Indexes, respectively. This resurgence has helped restore the strategy’s commendable track record.
 
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Morningstar Pillars
PeopleAbove Average
ParentAbove Average
ProcessAbove Average
 
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