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Orbis launched its first three funds: Orbis Global, Orbis Optimal and Orbis Leveraged on 1 January 1990. The Orbis family of funds has since grown to include a range of long-only equity and absolute return strategies, available offshore and in multiple onshore jurisdictions.

Since our inception, Orbis has endeavoured to build a sustainable investment philosophy and process that is capable of delivering superior long-term performance and a consistently satisfying client experience. We cannot promise that this will always be the case, but we have continually refined our investment philosophy and process in an effort to maximise the probability of achieving these objectives.

For example, we believe that creating a tight alignment between our compensation and our clients' investment success is essential. To that end, all of our fee structures have been performance-based since the inception of the firm. Our key executives have a substantial portion of their own assets invested in our funds. We believe that this alignment of interests between us and our clients lies at the heart of our success as a firm and as investment managers.

The Orbis approach to investment management and our core values as a firm can be traced directly to the vision and ideals of our founder and Chairman Allan WB Gray. A Harvard Business School graduate, Allan's investment career began in 1965 at Fidelity Investments in Boston. He spent eight years at Fidelity, where he was ultimately responsible for managing the Fidelity Capital Fund – a $500 million fund when he left the firm in 1973.

While fellow Fidelity colleagues Peter Lynch and Gerry Tsai later went on to become well-known in the American investment community, Allan left the US to pursue a long-held dream of building his own firm and introducing professional investment research and management methods to his native South Africa. He was the first South African to earn the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Allan Gray Proprietary Limited was founded in Cape Town in 1974. It has since become one of the top-performing and largest privately owned investment management firms in South Africa, with over $37 billion of assets under management at 31 December 2009.

Allan left South Africa in 1987 to establish Orbis Investment Management Limited as a separate international investment firm for high-net worth individuals and institutional clients. The firm began operations in late 1989 with offices in London and Bermuda. Since the 1990s, Allan and his son William Gray, Orbis' President, have both been resident in Bermuda, where the firm is headquartered and has more than 75 employees. Globally Orbis employs over 320 people including over 65 investment professionals. Over the course of the past twenty one years, Orbis has grown from a small firm with just $55 million in assets under management to one with $25.9 billion under management as of 30 June 2011 and a global presence spanning eight countries.