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Aberdeen Asset Management Plc Business and Capital Alliance Conference Call - Final.

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OPERATOR: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Aberdeen Asset Management analyst conference call, hosted by Martin Gilbert. My name's Benny and I'll be your event manager this morning. (OPERATOR INSTRUCTIONS) And now I would like to hand over to Martin. Please go ahead, Martin.

MARTIN GILBERT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, ABERDEEN ASSET MANAGEMENT PLC: Thanks. Good morning everyone. I'll take a few moments just to run through the announcement this morning, then hand over to you for questions. Bill Rattray's also with me, as is Chris Elliot, Head of Distribution globally.

What we announced today is both a business and a capital alliance with Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corp. That's a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group which, in turn, is the largest banking organization in Japan and the ninth largest globally by market capitalization.

Incredibly, or interestingly, Mitsubishi Heavy Engineering or the founder of the entire Group, has a strong connection with Aberdeen, having been founded by Thomas Blake Glover who emigrated from Aberdeen to Nagasaki in 1859. So there is a historical connection with the City of Aberdeen.

This agreement is dividend into two parts. With this alliance MUTB has agreed to market Aberdeen funds, and then I'll come back to the capital alliance.

So MUTB has agreed to market the Aberdeen funds to Japanese institutional investors, and also take a significant stake in Aberdeen by buying shares in the market today. As I say, it will promote Aberdeen products to its clients, starting with three products, emerging market equities, global equities and global fixed income. This gives us, Aberdeen, this gives us access to the Japanese institutional marketplace via one of the country's largest financial institutions.

Just to give you a bit of background, Japan is the second largest institutional investment market in the world, with assets under management of more than $3 trillion. It's a market that, like everyone else, we've been looking at for some time. But it's not a market that's easy to enter without a strong partner. And I'm pleased to say that we're now tied up with one of the strongest partners it's possible to have in Japan.

Obviously one of the key trends that we're hoping to piggy-back on is the increasing desire for Japanese institutions and pension schemes to allocate assets outside their domestic market and via specialized mandates, an advantage that hopefully we have, given the strength of our performance and capability in global equities and fixed income.

This alliance really completes one of the last parts of the jigsaw in our global distribution network. As you may know, we've got strong operations in Europe and the US and in Asia and Australia. But until now we've not had a strong presence in the Japanese market, and this changes that completely.

I think the second, coming to the second part of the agreement, in order to align our interests, MUTB have agreed to become a shareholder in Aberdeen and today are buying or have bought 9.9% of Aberdeen shares from other investors through the market. And I think, just to stress, these are not new...

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