Revised Fees and Team Enhancements for Performance
Summary by AI BETAClose X
Revised Fees and Team Enhancements for Performance
VinaCapital Vietnam Opportunity Fund Limited (the "Company" or "VOF")
29 June 2026
Revised Fees Structure and Other Enhancements to Strengthen Performance and Shareholder Value
VinaCapital Vietnam Opportunity Fund Limited (LSE: VOF), one of the leading actively managed funds investing in Vietnam's public and private market opportunities since 2003, announces a series of initiatives to strengthen investment performance and deliver value to shareholders. These include a revised fee arrangement that reduces costs and improves alignment through a long-term, market-based performance benchmark.
Since his appointment as Portfolio Manager in early 2025, Khanh Vu has driven a comprehensive review of VOF's strategy, execution, and organisation, with the objective of improving performance. As a result, the investment team has been reorganised around the core sectors of Vietnam's economy and strengthened with the new appointments of five executives with significant relevant experience to enhance the team's deal sourcing, origination and active portfolio management skills.
Mr Vu commented:
"Our stakeholders have been very clear: investment performance needs to improve, and the discount needs to narrow. We are responding with a sharper focus on high performance, and a clearer internal structure with disciplined execution on research, fundamental analysis, due diligence and risk management.
The sector-focused approach is already producing results. Over the past year, the team has completed more than USD795 million of investment and divestment activity across the financials, consumer, industrials and real estate sectors. We exercised sell discipline by trimming or divesting USD430 million in public and private equity holdings at attractive returns while continuing to make meaningful progress on restructuring legacy illiquid investments. We invested USD365 million into opportunities including proprietary pre-IPO transactions and privately negotiated public-market investments at attractive discounts.
Fundamentally, our strategy remains unchanged. We remain focused on identifying unique opportunities across Vietnam's public and private markets, negotiating proprietary access when possible, and actively managing investments through a Vietnam-based team. In a market where liquidity constraints can be structural, this approach remains well suited to delivering long-term, risk-adjusted returns. Looking ahead, we see attractive opportunities in pre-IPOs, privately negotiated transactions and selected listed companies where we can seek favourable terms.
Additionally, we have made significant progress on restructuring illiquid legacy investments and look forward to updating our shareholders once discussions have successfully concluded. In the meantime, we are committed to keeping the less liquid private exposures at current levels until we have demonstrated further recovery and returns from this asset class."
Revised fee arrangement
A new fee arrangement is designed to deliver value to shareholders by reducing costs and replacing an absolute return hurdle with a long-term, market-based performance benchmark.
New base fee: The base fee will be calculated as follows:
- 1.2% on the first USD500 million of net assets under management.
- 0.8% of net assets in the range of USD500 million to USD1.5 billion.
- 0.5% of net assets in excess of USD1.5 billion.
Based on the current net assets under management of approximately USD930 million, the effective base fee rate will be reduced to approximately 1.0%, which represents a total saving of approximately 30 basis points compared to the previous management fee arrangement.
New performance fee: The revised performance fee will be calculated on rolling five-year performance compared with a market-based benchmark.
- The market-based benchmark will be the FTSE Vietnam All-Share Index, which applies investability criteria to reduce over-concentration, address foreign ownership limits, and liquidity.
- The performance fee will be calculated each year at a rate of 3 basis points for each 100 basis points of performance relative to the market-based performance benchmark.
- In the event of underperformance, fees will be clawed back at the same 3 basis points rate, subject to a maximum clawback of 0.2% of NAV.
- Under the new fee arrangement, there will no longer be any carry forward of performance fees.
The total fee cap will be reduced to lower the overall maximum ongoing charges to the fund. The total fee cap, which includes base and performance fees, will be reduced to 2.5% of net assets under management.
The new arrangement will take effect from 1 July 2026, with transition arrangements in place for the first four years under the new structure.
Mr Vu commented,
"The market-based benchmark is designed to give shareholders a clearer way to assess VOF's ability to generate excess returns over the long term. With our long-term annualised returns of 11% in USD total return terms, VOF has historically outperformed the market-based benchmark in every market decline over the past 10 years. During periods of market rallies, VOF has outperformed approximately 40% of the time, resulting in overall outperformance in around 60% of periods. This supports our belief that our investment strategy can continue to deliver stable, long-term returns."
Chair comment
Kathryn Matthews, Chair, commented:
"The Board continues to have high conviction in VOF's strategy and believes VinaCapital is well positioned to execute on it and deliver long-term market outperformance through its unique public and private market access, experienced team, and extensive track record. The revised fee structure will materially reduce ongoing charges and better align incentives with long-term market outperformance, ultimately delivering greater value to shareholders.
With respect to the discount, the Board have been very active in returning capital to shareholders through regular buybacks and a sustained dividend policy. Over the past year, VOF spent USD86 million on buybacks and paid USD19 million in dividends. Since the inception of these programmes, we have returned over USD880 million in capital to shareholders."
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