Thursday August 21, 2008
KUALA LUMPUR: The global sukuk market is likely to gain momentum in the first quarter of next year following a period of slower growth due to the United States subprime market impact.
CIMB Islamic Bank Bhd executive director and chief executive officer Badlisyah Abdul Ghani said demand for infrastructure based issuance would remain strong with Malaysia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries being prominent players.
“The new issuance of global sukuk would find it difficult though to surpass the US$16bil of last year due to the current credit crisis conditions,” he said yesterday after the launch of CIMB Islamic’s new product, Market Select, a syariah-compliant capital-protected fund.
CIMB Islamic is, however, confident that the fund would be a success in spite of the global economic scenario. CIMB Islamic is the CIMB group’s global Islamic banking and finance franchise. Both CIMB Bank and CIMB Islamic offer retail banking services to over 4.7 million customers in 366 branches nationwide.
Badlisyah said by catering to the different investment portfolios of countries around the world, the Market Select fund was able to capture the upside of each market while mitigating risk arising from each.
The new fund would invest in 17 countries from developed and emerging markets around the globe.
These include developed nations such as the United States, Europe and Japan and emerging economies like China, India, Malaysia, Russia, Brazil and Vietnam.
According to CIMB Bank head of retail banking, Peter England, Market Select potentially offers higher returns than fixed deposits as it rides on the growth of new emerging markets.
He said Market Select’s dynamic investment allocation strategy would give average annual returns of 16.5% and 23.6% for the three-year and five-year plans respectively.
“This marks another innovative offering from the CIMB group through combining our skills and expertise in treasury, Islamic finance and takaful to bring previously inaccessible markets to the retail investor,” he added.
England said the group was targeting RM200mil take-up for the fund. — Bernama
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/8/21/business/1855103&sec=business
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