Mr. Chung: Fred Alger Management was founded in 1964. Our process is based on fundamental research with a philosophy of focusing on companies benefiting from positive dynamic change. We define "positive dynamic change" as companies experiencing high unit-volume growth or benefitting from positive life cycle change. We have followed that same philosophy since 1964 and are now widely recognized as a premier U.S. equities boutique.
What led us to create and expand into the international investment area is, in a literal sense, the work and investment opportunities uncovered by our team of analysts - which is comprised of over 30 people - and the bottom-up research philosophy that we've followed for 45 years. In the 1990s, we were very aware of the importance of the Far East, in particular Asia but also India, in terms of their rising participation in the technology industry. We were sending analysts there to do research, for example, on Taiwanese electronics companies, the semiconductor fabrication industry that was there and so forth. In this decade, as the importance of foreign markets has grown not only for the tech industry, which now ships more than half of its products overseas, but broadly speaking for many industries, we realized that our investment offerings should follow where our research was leading us. And in particular, we recognized that our research was identifying that some of the most dynamic growth markets - and even entire economies themselves undergoing a life cycle change - were in these very markets. The most obvious example: the opening of the markets that were once closed. This is the biggest life cycle change a market or economy can experience. China is the a market opening to the world. So we decided to create two international mutual funds, the Alger China-U.S. Growth Fund and the Alger International Opportunities Fund, and apply the same basic philosophy and the same research culture that we have utilized successfully for 45 years with our existing domestic equity funds.
Tickers included in this excerpt: DIS, MCD, YUM
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