Investors Pull $5.4 Billion From Europe’s Biggest Asset Manager

(Bloomberg) -- Amundi SA had its third consecutive quarter of withdrawals, the firm’s worst run since its 2015 initial public offering, as clients showed a reluctance to take risks after a bruising end to last year.

Investors pulled 4.8 billion euros ($5.4 billion) in the second quarter, Europe’s biggest asset manager said in a statement Wednesday. In contrast, Deutsche Bank AG’s DWS Group has bounced back from the mass outflows in the industry at the end of 2018 by posting inflows for the first six months of the year.

Successive quarters of outflows are rare for Amundi, which has grown its assets under management through acquisitions and attracting investors since the firm went public. In the second quarter, the firm’s assets climbed less than 1% to about 1.49 trillion euros.

Most of the second-quarter redemptions came from treasury products, partly due to companies withdrawing cash to pay dividends, according to the statement. Retail clients added 1.9 billion euros to Amundi’s funds, far less than the 12.9 billion of inflows a year earlier.

Amundi is sticking to the targets it set as part of a three-year plan through 2020. However, as far as inflows are concerned, “everything depends on what happens in terms of the risk aversion in the market,” Chief Executive Officer Yves Perrier said on a call with journalists. That’s the goal that’s the most uncertain, he said.

Perrier added that in the most recent period, Amundi started seeing some positive signs again. As a result, the firm is more optimistic about the second half than the first.

Despite the outflows, Amundi has been able to keep a firm grip on its costs. Amundi’s second-quarter net income was 4.9% higher than a year earlier and its cost-to-income ratio was little changed from the previous three months.

The money manager has also made gains in passive investing, with exchange-traded funds seeing 4.2 billion euros of inflows in the first half of the year. Though it’s the biggest money manager outside of the U.S., Amundi lags behind European competitors like DWS and Societe Generale SA’s Lyxor in the fledgling ETF market, and is well behind global leader BlackRock Inc.

In a difficult market for asset managers, speculation of consolidation is rife that Europe’s leaders could seek consolidation to add scale. When asked about potential deals, Perrier said he doesn’t see any opportunities for acquisitions at the moment.

To contact the reporters on this story: Lucca de Paoli in London at gdepaoli1@bloomberg.net;Melissa Pozsgay in Paris at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Shelley Robinson at ssmith118@bloomberg.net, Andrew Blackman, Josh Friedman

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