Perpetual Investments says early super demand less than $10m

Perpetual Investments has said the demand for early super withdrawals have so far come in at below $10m.

Perpetual CEO Rob Adams

Perpetual Investments said the wealth manager was able to process the “small” amount of early super withdrawals that have so far come in at below $10m.

Perpetual chief executive Rob Adams said the government’s estimates of about $30bn being paid out in total for early super withdrawal were in line with what he was seeing across the sector.

This is well short of the $50bn estimates initially being forecast by the industry super sector.

“In terms of the super withdrawal opportunity (for Perpetual) it’s around $7m-$8m, so it’s pretty small in the scheme of things — which to be honest is a bit of a surprise to me, but we are seeing similar things from many of our peers,” Mr Adams told the Macquarie Australia conference on Thursday.

Mr Adams said the market was shifting back in favour of value managers such as Perpetual, which has $21.4bn in funds under management.

Mr Adams told the conference his fund managers were “buying quality stocks” at reasonable prices that in some cases for years they haven’t been able to buy.

“They are as happy as I have ever seen them and that is because they are setting up their portfolios for future success,” he told the conference.

“We saw it in the GFC, we saw it in the tech bubble, we saw it the 1987 crash,” he added.

Still, Mr Adams was keen to stress that unlike “pure play” asset managers, approximately 40 per cent of Perpetual’s total revenues are not directly linked to investment markets.

Even so, Mr Adams noted that Perpetual Investments and Perpetual Private market revenues “were impacted by the steep COVID-19 related market declines in March”. But notes we have seen “some of these declines reverse as markets rebounded in April”.