beyondbrics

If you’re going to promote investment opportunities, there’s no better time to do it than when the country in question is riding a wave of World Cup fever. So it is for South Africa.

Japan has not been a football-loving country for long, but there are few Japanese who are not now familiar with South Africa, not least because of the Asian team’s feisty victory over Denmark during the tournament. That win also led to a Twitter record of 3,283 tweets per second, as fans took to their mobile phones as the final whistle blew.

In the build-up to the world’s most popular sporting event, Japan’s Nomura and South Africa’s Investec  teamed up to offer Japanese investors an equity fund focused on resource companies. The fund has gotten off to a busy start, collecting more than $190m since its launch June 17, according to Investec.

This is the second time that Nomura and Investec have worked together. Last year, Investec started running Nomura’s commodity trust, which inlcudes oil and gold future funds. Investec also teamed up with Japan’s Shinsei Bank last year and manages a South African rand-denominated money-market fund, which has produced returns of 13.72 per cent since January 2009. Investec is now in talks with Japanese asset managers about possibilities for other equity and fixed-income funds.

Lovers of the carry trade have been trading the rand for a number of years now, keen to benefit from South Africa’s 10 per cent interest rates relative to Japan’s 0.1 per cent. It is possible that South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup this year could pique the interest of a broader range of potential investors interested in resource plays.

Japanese retail investors are not the only ones showing an interest. On Thursday, the country’s biggest telecommunications operator, NTT, agreed to buy Dimension Data, the UK-listed South African information technology group in an all-cash deal that values the company at £2.1bn ($3.2bn).

The next World Cup is being held in Rio de Janeiro. Japanese retail investors have already begun their love affair with the Brazlian real though. Data from the Japan Investment Trusts Association shows that as of June, individuals held a record Y2,495bn in real-denominated funds, mainly bond funds.

The question is whether World Cup fever will bring even more investment fever to Brazil from “Mrs Watanabe”?