2020 Winners
Best Fund Provider – Emerging Market Equity
Goldman Sachs Asset Management


Hiren Dasani
managing director, co-head of global emerging markets equity, Goldman Sachs Asset Management – Singapore
Our investment team, composed of over 30 dedicated investment experts, is based in five different locations across the globe, and its profound experience and knowledge allows us to find high or improving quality companies with strong management teams and sustainable return profiles that are available at attractive valuations.
This expertise has driven the team’s success in investing across a range of sectors and market capitalisations. The portfolio maintains a meaningful exposure to small and mid-caps, as well as off-benchmark names to take advantage of these less-efficient parts of the market.
Finally, our rigorous approach to risk management — which aims to drive risk from our stock-level decisions and focuses on maintaining a balanced portfolio at all times — has been the key driver of our consistent performance across different market environments.
As a fundamental bottom-up stock picker, the firm’s locally based research and investment team was vital to its success, thanks to its strong on-the-ground knowledge and expertise across different emerging countries and sectors.
Worth noting, Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s presence was spread across emerging markets, such as Brazil, Hong Kong, and India. This allowed it to conduct over 4,000 company meetings per year and obtain direct and timely access to corporate information.
With a strong value and fundamental bias, the team performed in-depth valuation analyses, finding companies that were trading at a substantial discount to intrinsic value.
As the firm’s flagship strategy, the emerging market equity portfolio invested in all market caps with meaningful exposure to those off-benchmark and less researched names, resulting in high active share as well as strong alpha generation. The results speak for themselves, as the strategy outperformed MSCI EM index by 4.58%, 1.89%, and 3.51% respectively over the past one, three and five years annualised, as of end August 2019.
The success of the firm was reflected too in its fund gathering capabilities. In 2019, over US$400 million was raised for this strategy, even though investor risk sentiment had been dented by the headwinds of an economic slowdown and geopolitical tensions.
The asset manager’s best-in-class investment approach and thoughtful risk management framework, along with a superior level of customised service, earned it the title of Asian Private Banker’s Best Fund Provider – Emerging Market Equity.