Mark Mobius to retire from Franklin Templeton after over three decades

Pioneer of EM investing

Emerging market investing pioneer Mark Mobius is to retire from Franklin Templeton Investments at the end of January, after more than 30 years at the firm.

Mobius, who is currently executive chairman of Templeton Emerging Markets Group (TEMG), was hired by the late Sir John Templeton in 1987 to launch one of the first mutual funds dedicated to this region. In an interview last year with Investment Week, the manager described how at the start of his career emerging markets were dismissed as "underdeveloped, the poor, the third world or the south, so nothing very optimistic". "We started in 1987 with $100m and only six markets where we could invest as everything else was closed," Mobius recalls. "We had the Iron Curtain, Communist China...