Martin Currie, the Edinburgh-based specialist equities manager, has reported what chief executive Willie Watt has called "an exceptional year".
The employee-owned business yesterday published results for 2006 showing a rise of 122% in adjusted pre-tax profit to £22.9m, after generating £22.5m of cash during the year.
It netted £3.6bn of new business, lifted revenue by £10m to £80.4m, and increased funds under management by £2.5bn to £13.3bn.
Currie employs 216 but during the year it made 19 back-office staff redundant in an outsourcing transfer. It believes this year's growth may support the creation of another 20 to 30 jobs.
Watt, who took over in 2001, said it had been the "culmination of the work we have done over the last five or six years". He said Currie had built up a new team, delivered decent performance except last year in Japan and UK Active, and had also enjoyed the benefit of the gradual flight of money into specialist equities over the last three years.
"We have been in a relatively sweet spot in the market. The other thing we have done is internationalise the business. In 2001 we were strong in the UK and US but had nothing in Europe or the Middle or Far East. Now two-thirds of our clients are outside the UK."
He said over half of new business was from existing clients, notably wealth managers offering more funds to their own high net worth clients. But he admitted: "We need to build more strategic relationships we tend to win business on a mandate-by-mandate basis, some of our competitors are maybe better than we are at this kind of thing and it is something we would like to improve."
Watt added: "In the last five years there has been a huge amount of wealth created around the world, and a lot of that is now being professionally managed - for the first year or two there was a tendency to keep it in more liquid assets because people were still thinking back to the crash, then it tended to go into hard assets like property."
Watt said Currie had exited private equity because it could not be "best in breed", its $1.3bn (£670m) hedge fund business was not really scaleable, and it had not attempted to wade into property funds. "But we think that even if markets become more choppy, active equities are still going to be a very important asset class."
Currie this week launched a £110m Asia fund on the back of strong performance, and has also shone in the US.
The five-year record shows profits dipping from £2.4m to £1.4m in 2003 then rising sharply to £7m and £13.7m in the following two years, while revenues have risen by £46m in three years. Finance director Ralph Campbell commented: "It is the investment that was made in 2002-03 that has driven the increase in revenue."
He added that the key measure was distributable reserves, which had risen from £8.6m to £19.3m.
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