Over 5 bil ASM, ASW 2020 units for sale (Updated)

Updated 6:58pm, 20 April 2009

JOHOR BARU, 20 April 2009: Permodalan Nasional Bhd (PNB), the country’s biggest fund manager managing RM76 billion worth of funds, will offer 3.33 billion new units of Amanah Saham Malaysia (ASM) and two billion Amanah Saham Wawasan 2020 (ASW 2020) units.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who announced this today, said the units would be sold from tomorrow at all the 1,500 agents and Amanah Saham Nasional Bhd offices country-wide while the ASW 2020 units can bought from 27 April.

Each investor can buy a maximum of 20,000 units in the two schemes.

The announcement on the new unit trusts offer, which would enable more Malaysians to participate in the capital market, was made by the prime minister when launching the 2009 Malaysian Unit Trust Week here.

The unit trust week, an annual event, is to boost awareness and understanding on investment and the importance of planning one’s finances.

Najib said the unit trust week hosted consistently every year over the past 19 years had yielded positive results in educating the people on the importance of savings and investment.

“If during the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 saw investors withdrawing close to RM1 billion from unit trust schemes run by PNB like ASB, the situation is much better now,” said Najib, who is also Finance Minister.

The prime minister said last year PNB enjoyed more than RM10 billion in net inflow into funds it was managing.

“I’m very happy PNB has succeeded in pooling more than RM87 billion from more than 9.3 million investors,” he said.

Najib said the net inflow of PNB unit trusts was RM5 billion so far this year.

He said the dividend distributed to investors has exceeded RM65 billion, thus contributing to improve the socio-economic well-being of the people.

“This means PNB’s unit trust funds have educated the people to be more efficient and prudent in managing their finances,” he said.

Najib said the introduction of ASN and other unit trust schemes through PNB had changed the people’s paradigm on investing in unit trusts to an unexpected level.

“Before ASN was introduced, Malaysians, especially bumiputera, were very alien to the investment world,” he said

The prime minister said the unit trust industry became synonymous with the people through PNB’s continuous aggressive efforts until now besides efficient implementation of investment educational programmes.

“In fact, it is not too much if I say the PNB unit trusts have succeeded in developing a own brand in the country’s unit trust industry by galvanising solid support from bumiputera and non-bumiputera,” he added. — Bernama