(Bloomberg Gadfly) -- In October 2015, Amundi SA Chief Executive Officer Yves Perrier said his goal was "to make Asia into a second domestic market." He's slowly starting to realize that ambition.
Europe's biggest asset manager pulled in a record 39.8 billion euros ($48.1 billion) in new money in the first quarter, it said on Friday. Total assets under management swelled by almost 6 percent, to 1.45 trillion euros. And the 14.4 percent gain in Asia made it the fund's best-performing region.
There still work to do. The purchase last year of Pioneer Investments from Unicredit SpA gave Amundi additional firepower in Italy and Germany. But the firm's global footprint remains small, with France still contributing almost 60 percent of total assets.
Last month, Perrier told my Bloomberg News colleague Fabio Benedetti-Valentini that the firm was seeking to expand its Asian asset base by 50 percent to $300 billion within three to five years. At a euro exchange rate of about $1.20, the $228 billion under management in the region at the end of March puts him well on the way to delivering on that promise.
Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Gadfly columnist covering asset management. He previously was a Bloomberg View columnist, and prior to that the London bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He is the author of “Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable.”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jennifer Ryan at jryan13@bloomberg.net.
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