Indus Capital Partners’s Japan funds are bullish on the retail and hospitality sectors, having grown assets by about 7% this year on net inflows from investors.
(Bloomberg) — Indus Capital Partners’s Japan funds are bullish on the retail and hospitality sectors, having grown assets by about 7% this year on net inflows from investors.
The firm’s Japan funds trimmed exporter investments and rotated partially toward stocks in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries, said partner Howard Smith, who manages its funds in the country. He added that these companies could benefit from domestic real wage gains and the return of mainland Chinese tourists.
Founded in late 2000 by a pair of Soros Fund Management alumni, Indus oversees $3.7 billion of assets and has offices in San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Smith also favors small growth companies in financial and human resources technology, as well as e-commerce industries in Japan.
“That is how I imagine the opportunity set being most attractive in the next six to 12 months,” Smith said, declining to identify any stocks, because of regulatory restrictions. “Beyond that, it will have to depend on the depth of the duration of the US recession and where the yen-dollar exchange rate goes.”
In local currency terms, Japan’s benchmark is the sixth-best performer out of the 92 primary stock gauges tracked by Bloomberg globally this year. Semiconductor-related stocks such as Advantest Corp. and Renesas Electronics Corp. led the charge, having more than doubled in prices this year.
Started in December 2000, Indus’s $127 million Japan stock hedge fund is one of the oldest, outliving competitors who threw in the towel during the lost decade of the Japanese market. Its Japan strategy also includes a long-only fund that started in February 2010 and manages almost $1.1 billion.
Investors added $84 million of fresh capital to its Japan strategy in 2023, the firm said.
A version of the long-only fund, which does not hedge currency risk, advanced nearly 7.9% from its inception to June 2023, against an annualized 4.5% gain for Topix, according to investor updates seen by Bloomberg News. The hedge fund has gained an annualized 6.7% from inception to June, compared with a 2.3% rise posted by the Japan’s Topix index.
Indus declined to comment on performance, citing regulatory restrictions.
Apart from semiconductor companies, Indus also has investments in internationally focused Japanese stocks in the pharmaceutical, video gaming, precision engineering, material science industries as well as providers of animated content. Such companies which have primarily yen-denominated costs and collect revenue mostly in dollar have benefited from the strength of the US economy and cheap yen. The Japanese currency slipped to the weakest against the greenback in 32 years in October.
Smith sees yen strengthening over the next six months. The interest rate differentials between the US and Japan will narrow as Bank of Japan exits yield curve control and US rates decline. An appreciating yen will help boost disposable income and consumption in a country that relies on imported energy and food. The yen has already strengthened nearly 9% from its October low.
Read more on Bank of Japan yield curve control
Couple that with a very tight labor market and much faster wage growth, real incomes and consumer confidence will grow. With both countries having abandoned Covid-era restrictions, Smith is looking forward to the return of Chinese travelers, the big spenders, to give Japanese consumption another boost in the next six to 12 months.
Smith lived in Japan for a quarter of a century and has been with Indus since 2002. He says Japan is still struggling with a perception issue.
“Thirty years after the bursting of the bubble, people are still talking about public debt in Japan, or deflation in Japan, or poor corporate governance in Japan,” he said. “Japan has a growing number of world-class companies” but yet do not “trade at world class valuations.”
The introduction of corporate governance and stewardship codes about a decade ago sped up corporate governance improvements. In the last five years, companies including banks and insurers have been unwinding once ubiquitous cross-shareholding with other Japanese companies to tighten balance sheets and buyback stocks.
Companies are often acting on their own initiative, nudged along by regulatory and peer pressure, rather than activist investors.
“I have never seen an environment in corporate Japan where the management of companies is so conscious and so aware of capital efficiency and uses of cash flow,” said Smith. “That’s a profoundly exciting development and something that I have not really experienced for much of my career.”
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