By Phil La Greca
Welcome to our latest review of the super industry, designed to monitor trends and highlight points of interest.
The superannuation industry is now valued at $2.324 trillion according to the latest figures from regulator APRA.
To put that into context, Australia’s GDP for 2016 was $1.410 trillion dollars and the total market capitalisation of all the companies in the ASX 200 is $1.668 trillion.
The table below shows the total amount held in superannuation since June 2016 ($b), broken down by sector.
| Sector | Jun 2016 | Sep 2016 | Dec 2016 | Mar 2017 | Jun 2017 |
| Corporate | 54.7 | 56.3 | 57.6 | 58.5 | 58.6 |
| Industry | 466.4 | 481.7 | 500.6 | 517.9 | 545.2 |
| Public sector | 223.9 | 231.8 | 237.5 | 242.5 | 250.6 |
| Retail | 545.3 | 558.6 | 569.7 | 579.9 | 587.8 |
| SMSFs | 619.8 | 639.4 | 653.8 | 696.1 | 696.7 |
| Other | 188.5 | 178.1 | 179.3 | 185.9 | 185.5 |
| Total | 2,098.0 | 2,145.9 | 2,198.5 | 2,280.8 | 2,324.4 |
Looking at the various sectors comprising the total superannuation pool, the percentage breakdown is as follows, based on June '17 APRA figures.
When we look at the net rollovers for the June 2017 quarter, we see the following pattern.
| Corporate super | negative $1,103 million |
| Industry super | positive $6,114 million |
| Public sector | negative $4,782 million |
| Retail super | negative $997 million |
| SMSFs | positive $1.182 billion |
This continues the trend where net rollovers to SMSFs for the 2016 financial year totalled $7.028 billion and for the 2017 year totalled $6.271 billion.
The other area of interest is asset allocation. When we compare the APRA’s figures with the SMSFs in our Investment Patterns Survey, some interesting trends come to view.
While SMSFs hold more cash, the aggregate cash and fixed interest allocation for both sectors is similar: 31.8% for SMSFs in our survey and 33% according to APRA.
The aggregate equities exposure is also close with our survey and APRA returning figures of 48.5% and 50% respectively.
In terms of other defensive assets (property and infrastructure), the difference is more significant but this can be explained due to harder accessibility to infrastructure for SMSFs.
