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Cape Town - South African investors generally have little exposure to Japanese shares through investment funds.
According to Tal Nieburg, the head of unit trust researcher Morningstar South Africa, the exposure of registered South African fund managers to Japanese stocks represents 0.85% of total assets on its database.
Morningstar has 859 South African unit trusts on its database, with R985.87bn in total assets under management. Exposure to Japan is worth R8.3bn.
This corresponds with the view of the Association for Savings and Investment SA (Asisa), which represents life assurers and asset managers. Asisa estimates the exposure of South African investment and pension funds as being slight.
Chairperson Leon Campher and Peter Blohm, a senior policy adviser at Asisa, said the events in Japan could well have an impact on South Africa's economy and pensioners and investors would be affected by it.
Among local investment houses, Allan Gray has a largish exposure because an associated company, Orbis, which manages its funds overseas, is heavily invested in Japan.
The Japanese stock market fell almost 13% to last Thursday from the previous Thursday, the day before the earthquake and tsunami ravaged the country.
But fund managers agreed that the impact on the stock market this week offered more buying than selling opportunities. Global fund managers have in recent years been marginally invested in Japanese stocks.
On Tuesday, when Japan's markets fell sharply, Kokkie Kooyman, who heads Sanlam Investment Management's global investment team, said this was regarded as a buying opportunity.
What happened in the case of such a natural disaster, he said, was that rebuilding had to take place and this would stimulate the economy.
The market makes the mistake of focusing on the next two months, he said, which are likely to be bad with profits not looking good, but the growth that follows can be very strong.
Kooyman said funds that had not been heavily invested in Japan before the earthquake were on a better footing, because great benefits could be derived from a recovery in the market.
In his view the earlier wariness towards Japan had been because of the country's high indebtedness and low economic growth.
His team was now more positive because after the earthquake there would for some time be good growth as a consequence of the rebuilding that had to follow.
Paul Hansen, a director and fund manager at Stanlib, said the events in Japan could affect local funds invested in mining companies, especially those invested in platinum and palladium producers' shares.
Much of South Africa's production of these metals goes to Japan.
He also said there were good buying opportunities in Japan, and their shares were very undervalued because exaggerated emotional selling had taken place.
- Sake24
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