T Rowe Price's Luis Faňanas will join JO Hambro Capital Management's team of European equity specialists prior to the launch of a new concentrated European fund.

UK-based JO Hambro Capital Management has hired Luis Faňanas as a senior analyst to help manage its new European Concentrated Value strategy.

Faňanas joins the investment manager from T Rowe Price's global small to mid-cap team and was previously research director of European small-cap strategies at Deutsche Bank. He will work with fund manager Robrecht Wouters on the all-cap European Select Value strategy and its extended ECV strategy, which will launch at the end of March.

The new, benchmark-agnostic ECV strategy stems from demand for a concentrated, large-cap version of the ESV strategy, the company said in a statement. Holding around 25 positions, the ECV portfolio will adopt the same investment process as ESV to focus on undervalued companies with high expected capital returns. 

“In common with ESV, it will have sizeable sector biases and usually avoid commodity-like industries and capital-intensive sectors such as financials. In keeping with JOHCM’s policy of capping strategies in order to help deliver and sustain outperformance, the ECV strategy will have a capacity limit of £2 billion,” JOHCM said.

As of the end of 2014, JOHCM managed £16.2 billion ($24.9 billion) in long-only equity assets worldwide.