South Korea’s Mirae Asset Global Investments has acquired ETF Securities, Australia’s seventh largest manager of exchange-traded funds, in a move to expand its footprint in the A$118 billion (US$82.8 billion) Australian ETF market.
This is Mirae Asset’s first foreign acquisition since 2018, when it bought New York-based ETF manager Global X from JPMorgan Chase & Co for an undisclosed sum.
Mirae Asset, Korea’s second largest ETF manager, estimates that the new deal will increase its global ETF assets to as much as $85 billion.
Sydney-based ETF Securities currently manages 21 ETFs with around A$4.7 billion of assets, equivalent to around 4% of overall ETF assets in Australia.
Mirae Asset, which has $628 billion of total assets and Global X, which manages more than $40 billion of assets, bought ETF Securities for an undisclosed sum.
The deal gives them the opportunity “to add instant scale in the Australian market”, and ETF Securities’ lineup of thematic, commodities and digital asset strategies also complement the “innovative and intelligent ETF solutions” they offer global investors, Mirae Asset says in a statement on June 16.
According to Global X Chief Executive Officer Luis Berruga, the firm has, over the past few years, “worked to develop the infrastructure to be a leading ETF issuer, not just in the US, but in key ETF markets around the world”.
