LONDON -- J. Sainsbury PLC, London, is appointing a money manager to run a new 100 million ($162 million) passive international equities portfolio that will be benchmarked to the FTSE Multinationals index of 480 global companies.
The 2.6 billion pension plan will be one of the first U.K. plans to use this index when the portfolio is launched in early January, said Geoff Pearson, pensions manager.
The money managers on the shortlist for the mandate are Barclays Global Investors and incumbents Legal & General Investment Management and State Street Global Advisors U.K., which each manage passive equity mandates.
L&G runs a 850 million U.K. equity portfolio, and SSgA manages 60 million in U.S. equities.
Trustees decided to reduce the fund's exposure to U.K. equities by five percentage points, because of concerns the fund was overexposed to a handful of large U.K. stocks and underexposed to sectors such as technology and motor manufacture.
The fund has 55%, or 1.5 billion, invested in passive U.K. equity. Just 25% of the fund is invested in non-U.K. assets.
