< The 2015 All-Asia Research Team
Total appearances: 3
Team debut: 2002In second place is Morgan Stanley, which vaults from runner-up to post its best showing on this list to date. Hozefa Topiwalla, the firm’s head of equity strategy for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region, captains this crew and several more. His groups tracking Thailand (helmed with Mayank Maheshwari) and Malaysia earn runner-up positions on their respective rosters, and the squad he guides with Wee-Kiat Tan in reporting on Indonesia delivers the firm’s first top finish on that lineup. Indeed, the Singapore-based researchers’ “key competitive edge lies in their ASEAN-hub focus,” remarks one fund manager. “While some other bulge-bracket firms have similar setups, Morgan Stanley is the only one that executes it to perfection.” The ten analysts follow 40 Singaporean companies, and one of the more recent additions to their collection of favorite stocks is Singapore Telecommunications. Citing dividend growth, they added the telecoms operator — Southeast Asia’s largest, by revenue — to their focus list in May 2014. Sure enough, by the end of last month, the shares had jumped to 4.43 Singapore dollars, gaining 17.5 percent and besting the domestic market by 10.6 percentage points. SingTel remains among the group’s preferred names, earning a price objective of S$4.65. Topiwalla, 43, moved to Morgan Stanley in 2003 from ICICI Securities in Mumbai. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Mumbai followed by a master’s degree in financial management from the same institution.
