Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Okay. (Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Steve Fagger [ph].
Steve Fagger
Gentlemen, good afternoon.
Sean O’Connor
Hi, Steve. How are you doing?
Steve Fagger
Doing fine. Thank you. Well, an interesting period we’re going through. I was just looking at the Q and the next contribution. I’ve got one question there where you might just share a little extra color, if you would, or a little extra light. I’m looking at the line on asset management. And the number, in terms of the contribution, is essentially unchanged over last year. Yet, by my rough calculation, assets were up by certainly $1 billion over the same period. So what am I missing there?
Sean O’Connor
Okay. Well, there are two factors that go into asset management, which people should be aware of. One is, we have provided some seed capital to our asset management activities. And in fact, that led to the launch of the recent Africa fund, and we think it’s going to help us launch additional products. And that seed capital in aggregate did not do very well for us this last quarter. I mean, it’s going to – we’re slightly down. So we recorded a very small loss on the aggregate seed capital, whereas in prior quarters we had done very nicely. Some of those seed capital accounts were up as much as 50%, 60% per annum. So that’s one aspect.
The second aspect is, while we’re very comfortable with our asset management guys and all of our track records are doing fantastic as well, doing the current quarter, we did fall behind some of our performance benchmarks. And typically, in most of our funds, we have a hurdle rate that gets adjusted monthly. It’s liable on some of the funds. It’s other numbers on other funds. And if we don’t make returns that exceed that, we fall behind that hurdle. And we happened to fall behind that hurdle during this quarter, which means that firstly, we didn’t make performance fees on the current quarter, and in certain instances it led to a – basically, a claw back of prior performance fees that has been reported in the prior quarter. So clearly, we start falling behind on a performance fee basis, you can end up giving back performance fees not just for the current quarter, but for longer periods.
So we had both of those things happening, which offset, quite frankly as you point, the increase asset base that the company’s got. And we’ve continued to see inflow. So investors are very happy with our performance. I think we are now, probably, in the top sort of – definitely, in the top docile of every fund. Some of our funds are number one now in their category, so done very well in a very difficult environment. But that explains the numbers.
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