Emerging ASEAN is one of the most compelling investment stories of 2024 – offering what is now an uncommon combination of growth and undervaluation. Having come to the end of its rate hiking cycle, with economic growth very much intact, Emerging ASEAN now benefits from tailwinds from a cyclical transition to stimulus amidst solid structural growth fundamentals. Vietnam in particular moved early and decisively in 2023 towards stimulus and its market is now favourably positioned with a PE to 2-year earnings CAGR ratio of only 0.36. In this article our Senior Advisor Say Boon Lim and Portfolio Manager Alex Chu discuss more about the fundamental growth drivers for this under-covered region, and how the end of the US rate hike cycle and the current valuation offer attractive opportunities for global and emerging markets allocators looking for uncorrelated alpha.

Global markets have hit extremes in sentiment – extreme exuberance towards the US and Japan and extreme pessimism about China. That sentiment has in part been driven by straight line projections of the cycle – the expectation that the US will continue its current path towards “Goldilocks” and Japan can sustain its currency depreciation-led earnings growth. The risks are that the cycle in the US transitions not to “Goldilocks” but to recession, and Japan’s Yen depreciation/reflation cycle cannot be sustained without dangerous inflation and ultimately government debt consequences. For China, the extreme in pessimism is predicated on the assumption that China cannot escape its cyclical weakness of the last 12 months, notwithstanding its ample policy “ammunition”.

While many other economies have bounced back to trend growth, the latest IMF forecast shows that collectively the Emerging ASEAN-5 will likely have the strongest growth outlook among the major market/regional groupings. The IMF forecasts suggest that Emerging ASEAN-5 will likely grow its collective nominal GDP by 56% between 2022 and 2028, and will grow its nominal GDP from 72% of Japan’s GDP in 2022 to 92% by 2028. Their expected gain will be way ahead of those estimated for the Developed Market economies of the US, Euro Area and Japan. In this article, our Senior Advisor Say Boon Lim discusses the growth trajectory and drivers for opportunities in ASEAN, and why ASEAN is well placed to gain alpha while US is entering its final phase of the rate hike cycle.

As China’s post reopening recovery has taken a slower pace than the high hopes of the markets, there have been concerns that China’s economic growth will be lower for longer resembling Japan’s "Lost Decade". However it is important to note China and its people do have a solid track record of resilience, and there are several structural features of China that differentiates it from other emerging markets or Japan in its growth trajectory. In this article, our Senior Advisor Say Boon Lim shares 12 interesting charts to review in the context of China’s relatively high economic resilience (as measured by the Swiss Re Institute’s Resilience Index), comparing with MSCI Emerging Markets ex-China’s key constituents namely India, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia. Economic resilience being a product a policy stability and prudence, are pointing to an undervalued opportunity in Chinese equities and the appeal of Chinese government bonds for its stable yield at a time when other countries’ government rates and bond yields are surging.

2023 will likely present investors with a stark economic divergence – between a West in recession and an East where growth will be boosted by recovery in China. ASEAN-5, which already enjoyed its own reopening rebound in 2022, will likely ride the tailwinds of China’s turn at a reopening recovery in the coming year. In this article, we would discuss how ASEAN-5 will likely continue to be in a sweet spot in 2023, offering some of the highest economic growth rates with relatively moderate inflation.

As the Developed Markets are weathering havoc from increasingly hawkish rate hike actions, ASEAN equities continue to retain relative calm and outperform DM as a regional expression of global value trade. While the trajectory for economic upgrades and earnings growth prospects remain intact, as DMs slide deeper into bear markets, some tweaking of the ASEAN trade – as a pure Emerging Market play – might achieve even better relative outperformance. In this article our Senior Advisor Say Boon Lim discussed drivers behind the outperformance of our Emerging ASEAN strategy against MSCI World Growth, and what investors with the flexibility for a spread trade might consider as the dynamics will likely remain in place for the rest of this year.