NETHERLANDS – The incumbent managers at Lucent Technologies’ 450 million euro Dutch pension fund, Schootse Poort and ABN Amro, have been replaced in a shift to specialist managers.

Philip Menco, principal of Fortunis Investment Consultancy, said Lucent has appointed new asset managers to replace the incumbents, which he termed “two well-known asset managers”.

According to “International Pension Funds and Their Advisors”, Lucent’s managers were Schootse Poort Pensioen-en Vermogensbeheer and ABN Amro Asset Management.

Menco said Lucent was not satisfied any more with their existing asset managers and that the existing asset allocation was not up-to-date with the changed market conditions. Also it felt that six individual specialist mandates were better than the balanced approach.

Schootse Poort’s head of marketing, Rob Schreur, could not be reached for comment. ABN Amro Asset Management’s senior vice president of marketing, Mark Lammerts, declined to comment.

Menco said the new managers are Aegon Asset Management, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, Ashmore and Bridgewater.

Aegon has won the lion’s share, with a 280 million euro European government bond mandate – benchmarked against the Citigroup EGBI index.

Arthur Smit, the director of the Lucent fund, said: “Aegon Asset Management won out over approximately 40 candidates we looked at.”

MLIM won a 65 million euro global enhanced equity index mandate benchmarked against the MSCI World index.

Ashmore and Bridgewater were both awarded equally sized emerging market debt mandates worth a combined 45 million euros. A 22 million euro hedge fund mandate has not been awarded yet.

One of the previous incumbents kept an indirect real estate mandate, Menco said.

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