Artisan [profile] remains on the prowl for PM teams, with alternative strategies and emerging markets specialists in particular catching the mutual fund firm's eye.

On Monday the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based mutual fund shop reported fourth quarter 2014 adjusted earnings per share of $0.76 and revenue of $206 million, missing expectations by $0.02 and $2.9 million, respectively. Its assets under management reached $107.9 billion on December 31, 2014, up 1.6 percent from Q3 2014 and 2.3 percent for the year. Artisan Partners Asset Management brought in $788 million in net flows last year, and the remaining $1.651 billion increase in AUM in 2014 came from market appreciation. Yet in Q4 2014 Artisan suffered $0.5 billion in net outflows and enjoyed $2.2 billion in market appreciation.

In an earnings call yesterday with analysts, which Seeking Alpha transcribed, BofA Merrill analyst Michael Carrier asked Artisan's priorities in terms of "the build-out of strategies" and "looking for any gaps or new talent" beyond Artisan's six current investing teams. Artisan CEO Eric Colson confirmed that, over the past year, the fund shop has continued to have "a very healthy dialogue going on in the marketplace with investment talent" specializing in emerging market stocks or bonds. And he's also seeing "a variety of alternative strategies" that might fit in with Artisan:

So we’ll continue to meet with those groups. It takes time to find the right team with the right alignment of interest into our business model. And a strategy that we think fits long-term asset allocation. I think that last point, there is quite a bit of movement on in the asset allocation world of whether it’s going to be a risk based asset allocation or outcome based asset allocation.

Yet new products from Artisan's current teams are not on the immediate horizon. In response to a question from William Blair analyst Chris Shutler, Colson confirmed that Artisan has "no near-term plans here to rollout a new strategy within any of the six teams right now." 

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