Fund companies in Germany are now holding assets worth €4,311bn for investors, according to the country’s Bundesverband Investment und Asset Management (BVI).
The figures, said the BVI, run up until the end of June and indicate that the industry stands in the same place it did at the end of 2021. Assets, the BVI said, have doubled in the past 10 years, with an average annual increase of 7%.
The BVI wrote: “This corresponds to an average increase of just under 7% per year. At €2,133bn, the majority of total AuM is invested in open-ended Spezialfonds. The fund companies manage €1,490bn in open-ended retail funds, €630bn in discretionary mandates, and €58bn in closed-ended funds.”
It added: “While investment funds received a net amount of €28.3bn in new money in the first half of 2024, institutional investors withdrew €15.7bn from mandates.”
The BVI said that new business in open-ended retail funds totalled €11.7bn. Bond funds led the sales list with €10.9bn. This was dominated by funds that invest in bonds with a remaining term of up to three years (€8.2bn).
It was also reported by the BVI that balanced funds recorded an outflow of €6.4bn. Property funds recorded redemptions in each of the last eleven months, totalling €3.1bn.
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In the first half of 2024 alone, there were outflows of €2.1bn, with net fund assets falling from €131bn to €127bn since the beginning of the year, also due to devaluations of properties in the portfolios of some funds. Its share of retail funds’ AuM is 8%.
At €697bn, equity funds had a share of 47%. Their volume has risen by almost 12% since the beginning of the year (€624bn). This is followed by balanced funds with €354bn (beginning of the year: €338bn) and bond funds with €221bn (€211bn).
According to the BVI, the AuM of closed-ended funds managed by BVI members have risen from €12bn to €58bn in the last five years. Private equity funds are the largest group, accounting for 43% of the net assets of closed-ended funds. Property funds have a market share of 33%. By mid-2019, they accounted for just under 60%.
The BVI said that infrastructure funds and credit funds also play an important role. The market for closed-ended funds is dominated by institutional investors: At €55bn, Spezialfonds manage 95% of net assets. The closed-ended retail funds (€3bn) mainly invest in property.