Based in Hong Kong, Hamon is a specialist investment management firm focused on the public and private markets in Asia including Japan and India. Hamon is part of Mellon Global Investments (www.mellon.com),
comprising investment management subsidiaries and affiliates based globally. The Dreyfus Corporation (www.dreyfus.com)
which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mellon, also manages a global technology fund which is one of the top performing technology funds in the US.
Asia is playing
an increasingly important role in the global Information Technology
industry. Many Asian countries have established clearly identified
competitive advantages in key areas of IT such as semi-conductor
production in Taiwan and Korea, electronics development in Japan
and software development in India. These advantages are being
fuelled further by positive policy moves by Asian (national and
local) governments who are keen to nurture the growing pool of
technical talent and entrepreneurial know-how in their countries
and to create the leading knowledge based economies of the future.
It is estimated that more than 85% of the components for all Personal Computers ("PCs") are now manufactured in Asia. Increasing use of the Internet throughout the world is continuing to drive sales growth of PCs and access devices and the main beneficiaries of this are Asian companies.
In addition, Asia contains world-class software development companies with the proven advantages of an advanced and extensive technical knowledge base, relatively low operating costs and the ability to transact and manage projects using English as a first language.
Within Asia itself, rapid development of IT infrastructure is occurring as the region embraces the technology age. The growth rates in Asian PC and Internet penetration are the highest in the world with countries such as India and China showing annual PC penetration growth rates of 71% and 51% respectively and the Asia ex-Japan region exhibiting a growth rate of 40%.
In the area
of telecommunications, Asian companies are significant producers
of the software and the hardware, that is required in order to
develop mobile and next generation broadband communication services
throughout the world.
Until recently, Asian technology companies have not been well understood but in spite of this many such listed companies have tended to outperform their market benchmark indices. With the growing global focus on technology, investors are increasingly focussing on these stocks. The introduction of new technology oriented stock exchanges in Hong Kong, Korea and Japan is also creating new opportunities to invest in and benefit from the growth of new and fast growing Asian technology companies.
