| The investment strategy of the Fund is to provide investors with access to investments in emerging markets. The Fund aims to meet its investment objective through bottom-up stock selection with a relative growth investment philosophy. Lazard’s Developing Markets Equity Investment Team seeks to create value in this way by assessing the trade-off between a company’s valuation and its forward earnings growth rate.
The investment universe typically includes companies domiciled in emerging market countries, or those with a significant portion of their net assets and/or sales from emerging markets.
The Team aims to pick the best companies from the investment universe based on their expected upside, which is a function of valuation, the rate and sustainability of growth and risk control. The goal of the strategy is to have a lower PE/G (price earnings to growth) ratio than that of the investment universe.
We seek to protect the Fund’s capital against the risks associated with investing in emerging markets by considering in our analysis the potential impact of macroeconomic, political and corporate governance factors on each company prior to its inclusion in the Fund. Also given consideration prior to purchase is the impact the stock may have on the Fund’s overall risk/reward profile.
Furthermore, in order to ensure some diversification, the Fund operates under strict country and sector limits to control exposure. No new security will be added if the result is a breach of these limits, and the Team will trim exposure as necessary to maintain these limits.
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