American investor Mark Mobius has died. The connection with Romania of the so-called “Indiana Jones of emerging markets”
Mark Mobius, considered a pioneer in investing in emerging markets, died Wednesday at the age of 89, according to an announcement on his LinkedIn page.
Mark Mobius/PHOTO: Wikipedia
This was known as “The Indiana Jones of emerging markets” for his willingness to explore new, sometimes risky, jurisdictions, writes the New York Post.
The notice does not mention the cause of death.
His books, half travelogue, half guidebook, offered an unusually human perspective on global finance.
In “The Little Book of Emerging Markets” in 2012, he wrote that behind every balance sheet and stock symbol is a community struggling to grow: “If you want to understand a market, start with its people.”
This idea summarizes his belief that direct observation is more important than abstract theory. He recalled that the opportunities were revealed to him during factory visits in Brazil, meetings with officials involved in privatizations in Poland, and discussions with businessmen in the Philippines.
Mark Mobius' most important connection with Romania was through the Franklin Templeton company. In 2010, Franklin Templeton won the mandate to manage Fondului Proprietatea, a huge fund created by the Romanian state to compensate victims of the communist regime. Mobius was the main driver behind the listing of Fondul Proprietatea on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) in 2011, an event that revitalized the local capital market. As executive chairman of Templeton Emerging Markets Group, where he worked for more than 30 years, Mobius traveled tirelessly, often visiting dozens of countries in a single year in search of undervalued companies and underappreciated economies. He claimed to have visited at least 112 countries.
In 2018, Franklin Templeton announced the retirement of Mark Mobius from the company, where he served as president. The group is also the administrator of Fondul Proprietatea.
Over the years, Mobius has been an unofficial “ambassador” of Romania in the financial circles of New York, London or Hong Kong. Although sometimes critical (at one point he compared the attractiveness of Romania with that of Botswana to emphasize the need for reforms), he constantly praised the potential of Romanian engineers and the IT sector.
Born in New York on August 17, 1936, with a degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had a varied career before finance. After his death, the leadership of Mobius Investments will be taken over by John Ninia and Eric Nguyen.
