The unit trust industry is now the main channel for Malaysians to invest in the capital market, according to Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
The market is now bigger and it has been wielding an increasingly wider influence among the people in the past 10 years. In various newspaper reports today (21 Apr 2007), Najib was quoted as saying that the industry has developed rapidly to become the biggest of its kind among Asean countries.
Last year alone, net assets in unit trusts expanded by 23.6 per cent to RM121.8 billion. Fund management rose 29.2 per cent to 164.4 billion units. Currently, there are also 38 financial institutions offering 416 types of funds.
The DPM also said that the total approved fund size was 339.9 billion units. This was an increase of 27 per cent from 2005.