OREANDA-NEWS. February 15, 2011. SEB’s Eastern European share investment team, based in Tallinn, has received an award from Germany’s biggest financial magazine, €uro, for the second year running, reported the press-centre of SEB.

Based on 2010 results, the SEB Eastern Europe Small Cap Fund was named strongest in the Eastern European fund category. The fund is managed by Sander Danil from SEB Asset Management.

Danil says the award is the result of his team’s dedicated work and recognition of their abilities in managing Eastern European funds.

“I’m glad to see that the fund, which is really pretty unique, has been noticed outside of just Sweden, where most of our investors to date have been from,” he said. “The good results we achieved last year had a lot to do with the relatively high proportion of assets we had in the shares of small and medium-sized companies in Russia, which registered significantly better yield than companies much larger than them.”

In describing the work that was done to ensure the success of the fund in 2010, Danil said: “We laid the foundations for it in 2009, when we bought up a number of shares whose prices had fallen away sharply as a result of the recession, but which in the longer term still showed strong growth potential. On a sector-by-sector basis we tended to favour infrastructure-related areas mostly – transport, construction and manufacturing of materials. And now, with the economy in the region recovering, small companies have the potential to grow more quickly than larger ones, mainly due to their greater flexibility in reacting quickly to the changes on and needs of the market.”

SEB’s Russia Fund, managed by Sulev Raik, was ranked third in the Russian funds category in Euro’s summary of 2009.

In addition to its Eastern European funds, whose assets amount to more than 1.6 billion euros, SEB Asset Management manages more than 500 million euros in assets in local pension and other funds and in its client portfolios. This makes SEB Asset Management the largest company of its kind in the Baltic States, with a total volume of assets exceeding 2 billion euros.

The Euro Fund Award, organised by Germany’s €uro magazine and the Axel Springer media group, recognises the funds with the highest yields in different categories. The volume of the funds taking part must be at least 20 million euros, and the funds must be registered for sale in Germany.