Obituary: Mark Mobius — globetrotter who opened investment world’s eyes to the possibilities of emerging markets

Mark Mobius, who died on April 15, aged 89, was an innovative investment manager who popularised the unfashionable emerging market asset class, lifting its importance to the core of many private portfolios.

It is sobering to remember just how marginal this sphere of investing was before the economics PhD from Massachusetts Institute of technology burst onto the US financial scene.

Although the New York-born Mobius, son of German and Puerto Rican parents, joined Franklin Templeton in 1987, after having worked at securities house Vickers-da-Costa, and running the highly regarded International Investment Trust Company in Taiwan, it took him until the mid-1990s to really establish his reputation.

The new reality

In the late 1980s, his team started with a $100m portfolio, spread across five investible markets of Mexico, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. This was just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the demise of communism and what Mobius has described as a “new reality” which took hold globally, when poorer countries began to welcome foreign capital chasing privatisation and expansion opportunities.

Colleagues of that era describe him as a “prickly” personality with pedestrian performance. But as he got into his stride, both returns and his empathy with investors and staff received a boost. Much of the preparatory work for the gargantuan task ahead — promoting and investing in the developing world — had already been done by Mobius and his MIT colleagues two decades earlier.

During his formative years, he had visited relatives in east Germany, crossing Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. He once described the chilling feeling of arriving “on a practically empty train to a deserted Leipzig station in the dead of night, with guards searching for smuggled goods”, and how he already pictured a brighter reality where subjugated nations would eventually become trading partners to his native US.

Anticipating this pivot-point, the young academics hatched a plan to rebrand forgotten corners of Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe, populated by hard-working yet impoverished locals, and exploited by a small band of colonially minded western expats.

The belief of the MIT clique, backed by economic modelling, was that these developing nations — disparagingly termed the “Third World” from the 1960s through to the 1980s — deserved a more sympathetic hearing, bearing in mind they had a potential for greater medium- and long-term economic growth. In this vein, they coined the phrase “emerging markets” to describe what they expected to become an unstoppable phenomenon.

More than anything, Mobius feared a return to this depressing “socialist model” would derail the market progress and opportunities he began to see around himself in the markets. After all, his main investment thesis was all about privatisation along the road from dictatorship to a “market-oriented era”, under the guidance of multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IFC. At this time, it was a minority pursuit in the highly entitled investment worlds of New York and London, peopled by privately educated WASP clans, to which Mobius definitely did not belong.

Asian adventure

Even by the mid-1990s, only Mobius and Arnab Banerjee at London fund managers Foreign & Colonial were championing investment in the emerging economies. But the story in Asia was different. Mobius — by then losing his hair — was fast gaining credentials for his shiny-scalped appearance as a cult figure, amidst the vibrant, highly superstitious gambling-obsessed Cantonese culture of Hong Kong, where he had made his home.

“One day we were visiting HSBC in Hong Kong, and as we were getting off the escalators on the ground floor, some local analysts spotted Mark. They immediately started calling out for stock tips,” recalls Stewart Aldcroft, who worked for much of the 1990s as head of PR for Franklin Templeton in Asia and remembers just how famous Mobius was an investment guru.

“They ended up chasing us all the way to the fifth floor, still calling all the way. Mark would shout back some foreign-named stocks in eastern Europe that no one could spell, let alone had heard off. He was always moving onto the next unfashionable market.”

Not only did he fly between these developing countries on his private jet, fuelled by instant noodles when airborne, but he managed to maintain an active social life when on land. A huge fan of musicals, films and theatre, Franklin Templeton’s marketing department promoted Mobius as the “Indiana Jones of emerging markets”, although a comparison to one of his favourite actors, Yul Brynner, was perhaps more apt. His hectic schedule included frequent face-offs with dictators and organised crime families, two key cohorts which often felt threatened by the vast investment power of his funds.

I remember him pointing out the plethora of building sites, flanked by local workers precariously scaling bamboo scaffolding across the Hong Kong districts of Kowloon and Wan Chai, and saying: “Look at what’s going on here, this place will grow and grow, markets will go through the roof.” Similarly, he was already spending much time on the ferry to the fledgling settlement of Shenzhen in the Pearl River Delta, which became China’s leading manufacturing hub two decades later.

Large western brokerage houses were extremely sceptical of his pioneering adventures at the time. When one leading British analyst told me: “Just ask this salesman, Mobius, how much of his own money he is investing in this region,” Mobius replied to the relayed question: “100 per cent, to every last dollar.” Not only was he investing investors’ portfolios and his personal money, but he was placing orders in the Chinese factories for exclusive lines of his favourite leather satchels and trademark wardrobe items.

Mobius typically met investors and journalists in a freshly ironed white suit, resplendent with accessories. Yet he did not trust even the most expensive hotels where he stayed, ate and worked out in the gym, to maintain his sartorial elegance. Instead, he scrubbed the collars of his shirts in the shower while bathing, dried them on the radiator and then meticulously ironed every last crease, while colleagues partied elsewhere.

Dorine Johnson, who headed up his London PR team and often travelled with him, praised his “grace, wonderful insights and sense of humour” and recalls an era during which “things were never boring”. Ms Johnson echoes much of the investment community with her words: “He was a true gentleman and he leaves behind a strong legacy in our industry . . . He has left an indelible mark on the lives of those who knew him.”

By the time he left Franklin Templeton to start up his own shop, Mobius Capital Partners in 2018, the emerging markets operation he had built up was managing close to $50bn.

He began to spend much more time in Dubai, rather than his previous favoured stomping grounds of Hong Kong and Singapore. When we last met in Dubai in 2019, he painted a vivid picture of a “small desert kingdom” providing a perfect example to the rest of the world about how to fast-track an emerging economy. When asked about his own wellbeing and health of his portfolios, Mobius, already 82 at the time and investing vigorously in China, India, Vietnam, Korea and Taiwan, told me: “I feel in pretty good shape.”