Lourens Pirenc & team
Morgan Stanley
First-place appearances: 3

Total appearances: 6

Team debut: 2009

After a year on top, Morgan Stanley’s crew under the direction of Lourens Pirenc slips to second place. Working out of offices in Melbourne and Sydney, the 26 analysts track 170 Australia and New Zealand stocks, earning plaudits for their “deep industry contacts, which combined with their broad, top-down perspective, produce superior insights,” as one fund manager puts it. Many investors single out for praise their May 2013 downgrade of Downer EDI from overweight to underweight, at A$4.79. The New South Wales–based company provides engineering and infrastructure-management services throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and based on its survey of the metals and mining industry, the team foresaw a significant drop in demand for Downer’s contract-mining services segment, in particular. Sure enough, the shares dropped by as much as 35.5 percent in mid-June, well behind the 9.6 percent decline in Australia’s broad market. They had rebounded to A$5.22 as of late April, however, climbing 9 percent since the squad’s downgrade, compared with the 6.5 percent rise for Australia’s shares overall. Meanwhile, one name the researchers favor is Lend Lease Group, a property developer and construction manager headquartered in New South Wales. Monetary easing and a potential uptick in publicly funded infrastructure building should support a recovery in the housing sector, they noted in December. Accordingly, they reiterated their outperform rating on Lend Lease. By late April the stock had jumped 26.3 percent, to A$13.01, pacing Australia’s broad market by 17.3 percentage points, and it remains recommended.