Mary Anne Wiley savours the one coffee she allows herself each day – a large, black jolt of java in a cup the size of a soup bowl – and talks about the current buzz that’s coursing through her industry: BlackRock’s acquisition of exchange traded funds competitor Claymore Canada.
The combination of Canada’s two largest ETF providers will offer investors a comprehensive suite of products, while giving BlackRock added heft to take on its most formidable competition in the asset management sphere – the mutual fund industry, says Ms. Wiley, managing director of iShares for BlackRock Asset Management Canada Ltd.
“We acquired them [Claymore] because there is a great amount of talent and attractive products, and we want to continue to bring that to the market,” Ms. Wiley says. As of Dec. 31, BlackRock offered 48 ETFs in Canada, representing $29-billion in assets under management, and Claymore offered 34 ETFs and two closed-end funds representing $6.9-billion in assets. Combined, operating under BlackRock’s iShares brand, they will account for 85 per cent of the Canadian ETF market.
“We know there’s demand for both product lineups … Our overarching goal is to make sure that at the end of the day, when the deal closes, clients feel they now have an even more powerful product lineup and service provider with the combined entity. What that’s actually going to look like is exactly the work that we are doing now.”
It was Claymore that initiated the deal with BlackRock, after weighing the intentions of several suitors, says Som Seif, who started what became Claymore’s Canadian operations from a laptop in his living room in 2005 after leaving an investment banking job on Bay Street.
Toronto-based Claymore was a unit of U.S.-based ETF provider Claymore Group Inc. before being acquired by New York-based Guggenheim Partners LLC in 2009. It was put up for sale last fall, with BlackRock announcing its acquisition of Guggenheim’s Canadian Claymore subsidiary for an undisclosed price in January. The deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter of 2012, subject to regulatory approval.
Mr. Seif says BlackRock was a respected rival, had a commanding presence in the Canadian market and – of the prospective acquisitors – most closely matched Claymore’s innovative culture. “To have it under one family actually makes a lot of sense.”
And, although it will ultimately be BlackRock’s call, “we don’t see any real [fund] closures or changes in mandate on either side, as there isn’t really much overlap across the funds,” says Mr. Seif, president and chief executive officer of Claymore Canada.
ETFs, which trade on stock exchanges, typically track an index or asset class. Unlike actively managed mutual funds, which strive to beat stock market benchmarks, ETFs, for the most part, are passive investment vehicles designed to replicate the returns of the indexes they track. BlackRock focuses on market-capitalization weighted indexes, while Claymore ETFs take a different approach, tracking indexes based on “fundamental” factors, such as dividends and cash flow.
“They are a perfect complement to one another. That’s why both have been successful independent businesses,” Ms. Wiley says. Claymore has different fixed-income product offerings, “they have non-cap-weighted equity and they have a really attractive commodity lineup,” she adds.
Adrian Mastracci, portfolio manager at KCM Wealth Management Inc. in Vancouver, says that, while BlackRock and Claymore take different approaches, there are enough similarities that he is “sure there is going to be some amalgamation” of funds once the deal closes.
“We are not happy to see Claymore go, of course, because we like competition. Competition is good for investors, and it’s good for advisers when we have more things to look at. So we are probably going to lose some things [as a result of the acquisition], and we are just going to have to deal with that.”
