Equity Mates · Oct 8, 2026 · 46m · 31m saved
With Cameron Robertson, Portfolio Manager of the Platinum Asia Strategy at Platinum Asset Management
Asia is 15% of global stock benchmarks but half the world's population, half its economic activity and more than half its growth, Cameron Robertson said, and most Australian investors hold far less of it than that.
Most investors who buy Asia for diversification end up with a bet on US data center spending, because tech hardware is now more than half of the broad Asian indexes. Robertson's fund owns that trade, but he spent most of the interview on hospitals in Delhi, chicken chains in Manila and a stage-lighting maker in Guangzhou.
"The fact that people only have 15% of their portfolio there, they're basically just missing out on half of the possible opportunities they could get access to." — Cameron Robertson
Cameron Robertson, Portfolio Manager at Platinum Asset Management, on Equity Mates, has run the Platinum Asia Fund on his own since March 2024 after serving as its co-portfolio manager, and bought SK Hynix in 2023, when the memory industry was losing money.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 46 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Tech hardware is more than half of the broad Asian indexes, so buying Asia for diversification can double a bet on US data centers
Platinum sold about 90% of its SK Hynix stake and still holds almost 7% of the fund in it
He said the stock trades on about 4 times next year's consensus earnings
Outside AI, Asian stocks went backwards over the past 12 months, and foreign ownership is at multi-decade lows
India spends $85 a person a year on healthcare, against about $7,000 in Australia
His new Delhi-area hospital holding is on 30 times earnings, and he expects profits to rise about 4.5 times in 5 years
India's story was never the problem; its price was, with consumer stocks on 70 times earnings or more
Astra International sells cars in Indonesia on about 6 times earnings, in a country of 10 times Australia's population that buys fewer cars than Australia
The market treats Tencent as an AI loser, but he thinks it is back in the running
If he could own only one Asian market for a decade, it would be Korea, not Indonesia, which he said may make the most money but is riskier
1. Half the World, 15% of Index
The hosts said Asia is roughly 15% of the global stock index, and that most Australians are underweight it.
Asia is a different set of economic drivers, which makes it a diversifier, he said
Assets with different drivers tend to move at different times, so when one falls another may be rising, and the overall portfolio has a smoother ride, he said.
His Asia excludes Japan. The Platinum Asia Fund launched more than 20 years ago, when Japan was the first large Asian economy to boom and the rest of Asia was still small, so Platinum ran separate Asia and Japan funds and has kept them that way. His big markets are Taiwan, Korea, China and India, and the Southeast Asian countries are important together but small one by one.
