Global acquisitions power Ninety One’s growth

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JIMMY MOYAHA: Ninety One Limited, the largest asset manager on the African continent, reported numbers for the financial year ended 31st March 2026. At the time of reporting those numbers, assets under management were just shy of the R4 trillion mark at R3.9-odd trillion, depending on which currency and exchange rates you are using.

We’re going to look at these numbers in a bit more detail with founder and chief executive officer, Hendrik du Toit. He joins me on the line now to see what we make of the performance. Oom Hennie, lovely having you on the show, as always. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Another strong year from an asset management point of view, growth from a business point of view, some really positive metrics, and net inflows just shy of the £3 billion mark. How do you reflect on the 2026 year that was?

HENDRIK DU TOIT: Jimmy. Good afternoon and good afternoon to the listeners. It’s a privilege to be here with you.

Well, we’re happy that the past financial year was a good one. We would have liked some strong flows in the second half of the year, because we did quite a bit of the work in the first half.

But the American president went to war in the Middle East.

Conditions changed towards the end of the year, and we had one or two wins postponed to the new year and one or two unexpected losses.

So the second half of the year was a bit slower, although we earned more money because the book was bigger. So, all in all a good year.

Ninety One is on the front foot but the important point is emerging: markets are starting to attract capital.

And at 60% of what we do, obviously South Africa is one, but here we are a domestic player.

If you look at our international business, the attractiveness of emerging markets is very, very important and we’re starting to see a real interest there, particularly because the Chinese and Korean and Taiwanese tech sectors, particularly the hardware side, is starting to attract attention from international capital. That obviously buoys the prospective returns.

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But we’re back in a world with very narrow markets, that is very big stocks taking all the action like SpaceX, like OpenAI, like Anthropic. These guys have built $1 trillion businesses in under 10 years – all of them.

So that is taking a little bit of the shine away. It’s no wild-bull market. We have to work hard but conditions are better than two or three years ago.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Oom Hennie, how are you feeling about that narrowing market? From an asset manager’s point of view, especially a global asset manager the size of Ninety One, returns are very important. But managing risk and managing concentration risk is equally important. We’ve been hearing of this ‘AI trade’ for the longest time. Does that have you concerned that there is too much focus, perhaps, in one sector at the moment, and that’s creating a lot more risk than necessary?

HENDRIK DU TOIT: I think, Jimmy, we’ve got to distinguish two things.

One is the kind of capital or financial rush into everything AI – at very high valuations. That’s probably quite dangerous.

But I think, as David Solomon of Goldman Sachs said yesterday, there is more greed and fear in the market, which means it will probably drive the market up. But at some point this thing is going to unwind.

As a professional investment manager looking after the retirement of people for the next 20 or 30 years, but often being measured on the last month or the last quarter, it’s quite difficult because we tend to spread the bets.

We tend to risk-manage our portfolios to make sure they’re resilient and they’re robust.

The highly concentrated ones capturing these sexy themes will do very well compared to us. We just have to keep explaining to our clients what we do for them, and why we are there.

I do believe, however, that once the market gets into a de-concentration phase, there will be enormous alpha to be had, and therefore the value of your active manager will be very high relative to your passive.

But the third point that’s important – and probably the most important one for the listeners – AI as a technology is changing the way we work, we live, we run our businesses. And if we don’t adapt or use it, we will be left behind. I think it’s also an important point for us as a country to make sure we expose the citizens to opportunities.

And this obviously starts with us giving everybody enough bandwidth. But we really have to. The world is changing and we need to adapt.

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JIMMY MOYAHA: Well, Oom Hennie, speaking of the changes and how it is that businesses are having to adapt, the last time you and I caught up you were in the middle of concluding a Sanlam transaction.

That concluded in the previous financial year. Thankfully, all of that dust has settled and that business has been added to the Ninety One business.

Take me through what that integration and what that completion now means for you as an asset manager.

HENDRIK DU TOIT: Thank you very much, Jimmy.

I think this is a really significant transaction for us because we don’t normally grow with mergers and acquisitions. We like to grow organically.

But here we had the largest distributor of savings product on the African continent – who happens to have been a client – come to us and say: ‘Would you like to partner with us in the field of active asset management? We’d like you to buy our business, which has had its growth challenges, and then be our in-house active manager’.

That has enormous upside for Ninety One, in particular because the portfolio that came across was largely fixed income, which grows our fixed-income footprint in South Africa, which doesn’t expose us to the fact that equity markets are probably quite high and give us a diversified revenue stream. And it was a great partner who also committed to backing some of our new ideas with some investment capital over time.

So I think that partnership is going to be great. It has settled down. It hasn’t disrupted our investment operation because actually not many people came across and the people who came across were excellent people additive to the Ninety One proposition. So we are very happy with that.

In the past year, we also concluded two other important partnerships.

One was to offer our products or our investment capabilities via ETF –exchange-traded fund – wrappers, in partnership with the world’s second largest ETF distributor. That is State Street Global Investment Management, which then saves us the money of building our own ETF infrastructure.

Our ETF is exactly like a mutual fund. It’s just a different way through which investors access our capabilities.

And then the third and very important one is the creation of Ninety One Asia in partnership with a Singapore-based alternative investment manager, Arc Avenue Asset Management, which really exposes us to growth companies in Asia and knowledge of the venture industry – which will then ultimately, given the listings boom that’s happening right now in Hong Kong, Singapore and China, really give us access to investment insights that we wouldn’t have had, and on-the-ground knowledge.

So this has been a big year of setting the business up for growth – not necessarily delivering all that growth this year, although 12% isn’t shabby. We think we’ve set up the business for some interesting opportunities in the years to come.

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JIMMY MOYAHA: Oom Hennie, before I let you go, part of setting up, that growth strategy involves looking at the business internally as well.

You took a decision to increase the share buyback programme from the £30 million initially announced last year in March to £55 million at this stage.

Take me through the rationale behind that, especially for a business like Ninety One that has the flexibility to be able to take this decision given the size of your balance sheet and where you’re positioned.

HENDRIK DU TOIT: We generate a lot of cash. Most businesses earn money, but it’s not cash. It’s tied up in stock or in capital expenditure. The asset management business is very cash-generative, and we believe that our shareholders should share in that cash we generate – through either dividends or buybacks.

And our share price is at an attractive level.

We tend to apply capital to buy that back, reduce the number of shares, and therefore claim the future profits by a long-term holder increase.

Please note that the people of Ninety One earn approximately 30% of the business – 29.4% as we speak after the Salam dilution. So we care about the capital and we are long-term holders. And we have long-term shareholders with us. We’re happy to increase their claim on future dividends.

That’s really what we’re doing here. So that’s to the benefit of our long-term investors.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Thinking about the long-term investment landscape and navigating that as the largest asset manager on the African continent – one of the largest asset managers in the world at this stage – the team at Ninety One had another robust year.

By my estimates, as it stands we should be north of the R4 trillion mark in assets under management. But we’ll await that confirmation from the team at Ninety One directly.

For now, we’ll leave this conversation on that note. Thanks so much to founder and chief executive officer Hendrik du Toit for joining us to take us through the numbers for the financial year that was.

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