Ann: AEF Results to 30 June 2017, page-15

Bad logic. Fee reductions can be made almost regardless of fund size. The capacity to reduce fees really comes from the growth in funds ie growth in revenue. If these funds are growing, then cuts to fees can be made to compensate for increased revenue. It's a great position to be in if funds are expanding. If FUM are growing at 30% p.a. then one could decide to cut fees by 10% and still have increasing revenues.
Look at a larger fund manager like perpetual. At one stage they had $40+ billion under management, now its $31 Billion. Now that's a 25% drop in revenue. Very tough to drop fees on top of that. IOOF on the other hand has more FUM and is growing it at a good clip. So there may be some capacity to drop fees at IOOF.
Well, AEF are growing their FUM at a faster rate than anyone else and all that matters to me is % increase in growth. It gets harder to get the same % growth as fund size increases. I tend to steer away from the top companies because mathematically it gets harder to grow at solid rates when you are nearly dominating to market..... there is a finite end to growth when you dominate the 'fish pond'.