AMP Capital takes steady investment approach

For immediate release: Tuesday 29 April 2008

AMP Capital takes steady investment approach with diversified portfolios

Head of Investment Strategy, Dr Leo Krippner, said AMP Capital Investors continues to take a reassuring and steady approach to handling its investors’ funds during this tough time for markets.

“New Zealand property performed very strongly for the quarter with an outstanding 10.4% result (27.4% for the year to March). However, when included with other growth assets – global and New Zealand equities (hedged and unhedged performed poorly) and even with cautious portfolio asset allocation, returns were negative for the diversified funds for the March quarter”, said Dr Krippner.

“AMP Capital’s conservative diversified fund returned -0.1% for the quarter and 4.7% for the year, its balanced diversified fund returned -4.0% for the quarter and 0.4% for the year, and its growth diversified fund returned -6.7% for the quarter and -2.6% for the year.

“Although history tells us that long-term savers benefit from riding through the short-term ups and downs, KiwiSavers will have to be very honest with themselves about their own appetite for risk and their psychological capacity for bearing short-term losses to allow this to work for them.

“Hence, we hope KiwiSavers will remain focussed on the well-established benefits of a disciplined long-term savings and investment strategy and we will try our hardest to convince them to stick with it.

“For our part, we have been deliberately streamlining the portfolios to absolutely minimise the potential for ‘unexpected surprises’,” said Dr Krippner.

Please see attached release and table of returns.

ENDS

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