(March 26): Asian high-end technology stocks offer the best hedge against the prospect of a prolonged Iran war, according to an emerging-markets equity fund that’s beaten 96% of its peers over the past year.
The Robeco Emerging Stars Equities fund has more than 40% of its assets in South Korean and Taiwanese shares, reflecting its view that chipmakers tied to artificial intelligence (AI) will retain their pricing power even in a downturn, according to client portfolio manager Jan de Bruijn.
“AI is not going to just die because of a global recession,” de Bruijn said in an interview. “Taiwan has a 80% market share, if not more, in logic chips. The Koreans have about 80%-to-90% share of the high-bandwidth memory chip market. So clearly they can pass a lot of costs through.”
The fund, which had total assets of US$4.6 billion at the end of February, returned 45% over the past year, including 6.8% so far in 2026, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
One of the fund’s strategies is to undertake proxy trades, where it buys shares in holding companies that trade at steep discounts to their underlying assets — sometimes as much as 60%. This allows it to gain exposure to its favoured themes at relatively attractive valuations. The fund therefore owns SK Square Co, instead of SK Hynix Inc, and Naspers Ltd instead of Tencent Holdings Ltd.
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“What you sometimes find is there’s a holding company that has a stake in a company, and then when you do a sum of parts, you’ll find that you’re getting into that stock story at a big discount,” he said. “We feel that discount will narrow over time.”
The fund is overweight in Latin America and holds selective exposure in Asia, while it’s underweight the Middle East. “We’ve ended up, I think being positioned reasonably well for what’s going on at the moment,” de Bruijn said.
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