IT’S SAID THAT wisdom comes with age. That would seem to be the case with Prosperity Capital Management, a Russia-focused equity fund manager founded in 1996 that over the past 13 years has established itself as the largest foreign asset manager in the region, with about $1.5 billion under management. Despite the seesaw nature of the Russian stock markets, PCM has delivered consistently strong results for investors. The firm’s flagship investment vehicle, the Russian Prosperity Fund, has delivered an average annual return of 16% since launch in 1996. That amounts to a fivefold increase since inception while the headline RTS index of Russian stocks grew by three times. PCM’s other main offering, the Prosperity Quest Fund launched in 1999, has performed even better, delivering an average 35% return over its lifetime, up 15-fold compared with a five-fold increase for the RTS over the same period.
Chief executive Mattias Westman, who co-founded PCM in 1996, believes that the firm’s success is based on its unashamedly proprietorial attitude towards its investments.