Richard Sennitt, manager of the Schroder Asian Income fund believes Asia offers plenty of dividend opportunities.
"Income has provided a substantial proportion of total return over the longer term in Asia and people still value Asia purely on growth. Dividends played an important part of total return and investors cannot ignore dividends when talking about total return in Asia," he says.
Sennitt believes Asia, as a region, offers investors good diversification in the form of more companies from which to draw income.
"For example, eight stocks in the FTSE 350 make up 50 per cent of the dividend income, whereas more than 35 stocks make up the same proportion of dividend income in the MSCI AC Pac ex Japan sector. Recovery in Asia has been driven by large amounts of self-help, both fiscal and monetary, and the region is well positioned to benefit from any global recovery. The strong profits growth being seen this year should be positive for dividend payments."
It seems other investment houses agree; JPM recently launched a new investment trust which looks to take all its income from emerging markets.
While Somerset Capital Management launched the Somerset Emerging Dividend Growth fund on 30 March 2010. Co-manager Edward Lam says the fund has its highest weightings in Brazil, South Africa, China and Taiwan.
"I particularly like South Africa and Taiwan because they are not on people's radars. In South Africa we are finding a lot of retail stocks and high cash generative exposure that is not as expensive as in other parts of the world like China," he says.
Lam points to HTC Corporation in Taiwan as an example of a good stock held within the portfolio.
"What I like about this company is that it is not capital intensive and it relies on its designs being good to sell its products. Half of its balance sheet is in cash and it has a yield of around six per cent," he says.
Data from Financial Express suggests there are 19 Global Income funds in the IMA UT and OEIC universe, with the top five best performing funds over one year shown below:
Performance of top 5 best performing funds over 1-yr
Source: Financial Express Analytics
AFI panellist, Tim Cockerill, head of research at Rowan says the global income story is gaining traction.
"Going back ten years, going abroad for equity income was something you did not do because there was not much of it around, that has completely changed. The UK is a relatively small contributor to global equity income as a whole. So there is a whole new world at there now where you can diversify and get into companies that are paying dividends that you cannot access through the UK.
Ben Yearsley, investment manager at Hargreaves Lansdown agrees: "I think this is a growing trend and I think there is an income bias now, especially form the Asian countries. People and companies are moving towards stable dividends and making dividends an important factor," he says.
Looking ahead the general consensus appears to be that the global income story is not a one-off investment.
"I think income, in emerging markets particularly, is very much in fashion at the moment, JPM are hot on our heels with their launch and I think there will be more launches like this," says Lam.
While Cockerill adds: "I do not think this is faddish I think it is a long term story and I think investors looking for income will increasingly look to diversify overseas. For a long time it has always been the UK but now there is greater scope.
"I do not think advisers will tell their clients to drop UK income full stop but I think they will start realising they can get income from overseas and when they build an income portfolio they will not be putting less in the UK and more overseas."