Global Emerging Markets Leaders

Rizi Mohanty is a Portfolio Manager at FSSA Investment Managers. He joined the team in 2016 and focuses on the Southeast Asian markets as well as Asia ex-Japan equities more broadly. He is the lead manager of the FSSA ASEAN All Cap and FSSA Asian Growth strategies. Rizi has more than 14 years of investment experience and is also based in Hong Kong.  

Rasmus and Rizi are supported by a broader team of investment analysts, with an average of 16 years of investment experience and 8 years tenure with the team. All 15 members of the FSSA investment team are analysts first and foremost, including the portfolio managers, and we spend the majority of our time meeting companies, writing research and seeking quality companies to invest in. 

How we invest

FSSA’s investment philosophy, which shares its genesis with SI, has remained broadly unchanged since the First State Stewart team was established in 1988. We focus on identifying quality companies, buying them at a sensible price and holding them for the long term. Most importantly, we invest our clients’ capital as if it were our own. As long-term investors and owners of businesses on behalf of our clients, we look for founders and management teams that act with integrity and risk awareness, and dominant franchises that have the ability to deliver sustainable and predictable returns over the long term.  

As a team, we conduct over 1,000 direct company meetings each year across Asia and other emerging markets. The most significant source of investment ideas comes from these company visits and country research trips. We find that our reputation as patient, long-term investors has given us unparalleled access to management, which allows us to gain valuable insights and a thorough understanding of the businesses we want to invest in. 

As a result of our long-term time horizon and conservative investment approach, our portfolios – and our performance – can look very different to the index. We shy away from “flavour of the month” themes (such as the current AI-driven boom), and instead look for high-quality companies that can deliver attractive returns for much longer than the market expects – and extend our investment time horizon to capture that advantage. When you own quality businesses, time isn’t a risk – it’s an asset. 

Our performance may lag in very buoyant or momentum-driven markets, but we usually compensate very quickly once such bubbles burst. Based on historical data, our long-term track record shows that our portfolios tend to perform better in “normal” markets (-15% to +15% returns over one year) and bear markets (more than 15% decline), than in steeply rising markets (defined as over 15% returns over one year). 

A smooth transition 

Given the significant overlap in SI’s and FSSA’s investment philosophy and portfolios, we know all the holdings well. As part of the transition, we made a few changes to tilt the portfolio towards companies with stronger cash generation, higher returns and better long-term growth prospects. In general, we are adding to holdings in China, where we have found leading businesses like Tencent, with strong competitive advantages and attractive growth at reasonable valuations. We are reducing exposure to India, mainly in cyclical businesses like Tube Investments of India and Motilal Oswal, where valuations are expensive and the growth outlook has deteriorated. 

Below, we highlight a few of the key additions and disposals over the fourth quarter of 2025.  

New purchases: 

Prosus is one of the largest technology investors in the world.  While listed in South Africa and Holland, a significant majority of Prosus’ assets are located in emerging markets. In addition to its 25% ownership stake in Tencent, which has been its most successful investment to date, Prosus has stakes in leading food delivery, classifieds and payment platforms in places such as Brazil, Eastern Europe and India. The company also has a notable track record of exits including FlipKart (India), Allegro (Poland) and MakeMyTrip (India) to name a few. The company remains attractively valued with a significant discount to its underlying assets. Management also have an ongoing buyback program funded by the gradual sale of its Tencent stake, which should boost NAV per share. 

Mediatek is one of the largest chip design companies globally. We have been following Mediatek for many years and have witnessed its performance through the cycles. Throughout the ups and downs in its history, its talented engineers and well-aligned management team usually find a way through to the next “big thing”. From optical drives for computers to scan CDs, it entered the smartphone supply chain with 2G modem chips and benefited from technology upgrades each year – until it collapsed in 2015-17 amid poor execution and competition from both low- and high-end competitors. In 2018 Rick Tsai joined Mediatek from TSMC and focused on getting the basics right again. We believe Mediatek has been transformed under his leadership into a better-quality company. In recent years, the company has improved its competitiveness, and we believe its market share will likely remain stable. With the smartphone market now in the mature stages, the company is investing into new areas (ASIC, auto, augmented reality/virtual reality, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence) to diversify and internationalise its business in the long run. 

Credicorp is a financial group in Peru with a leading position in loans, deposits, microfinance, insurance and wealth management. It holds nearly 40% share of the current and saving account (CASA) market and remains family-owned by the Romeros who have a 12% stake. The group has successfully incubated a fintech offering called Yape to avoid being disrupted by outsiders. Meanwhile, Peru’s financial penetration remains low even within Latin America, at just 48% credit to gross domestic product (GDP). With a leading deposit franchise, prudent culture and scale advantages, we are confident in Credicorp’s ability to grow while generating attractive returns in the long term. 

Complete sales: 

Godrej Consumer Products is a quality family-owned consumer company with a long track record in India. It has undergone a turnaround under a new (professional) CEO, but the valuation looks expensive for the expected growth. 

Motilal Oswal Financial Services is a non-bank financial company (NBFC) in India. We sold out of a lower conviction holding to raise cash for better ideas elsewhere. 

Voltronic Power is a Taiwanese company specialising in uninterruptable power supply (UPS). We sold out of a lower conviction holding to raise cash for better ideas elsewhere. 

Performance and outlook

With our long-term investment time horizon, we tend not to pay much attention to short-term market fluctuations. We invest on at least a three-to-five-year view, though we often hold on to companies for much longer. In an industry rife with short-termism, we believe our long-term approach stands out from the crowd. 

What we have seen, over the past few decades, is that average holding periods for stocks have fallen from over eight years in the 1960s to less than six months today.  Yet this shift has come at a cost: it reduces investors’ ability to generate outsized returns that are materially different from the broader market. The reason is simple — as investment horizons shrink, so does the return dispersion between the best- and worst-performing companies. With less time in the market, investors end up tracking the index, not beating it. 

Emerging Markets: time horizons matter

MSCI EM Index -dispersion around mean return for top 10% top / bottom stock performers

The long-term outlook for Indian companies remains bright

The quarter saw a continuation of an unhelpful dynamic: the significant outperformance of the Chinese market relative to India, to which this strategy has a significantly higher level of exposure. Despite this, we remain enthusiastic investors in high-quality companies aligned with India’s economic development. So far, this year has seen a reduction in income taxes and a simplification of the Goods and Service Tax (‘GST’) system. The Reserve Bank of India, meanwhile, has been cutting interest rates. So demand is now being supported by both fiscal and monetary loosening. 

There is, of course, more to emerging markets than China and India. Recent trip reports from Indonesia, India and the Philippines are available on our Insights page. Having visited South Korea in September, we are increasingly confident in the changes to corporate governance standards that are unfolding in that country. These echo similar reforms seen in Japan and should have positive effects on shareholder returns in Korea and perhaps across the region more widely – a similar mood of reform now seems to be infecting other countries across Asia. 

Continuity and change

It would be remiss not to mention the changes that have taken place at Stewart Investors   over the last quarter. After acting as careful stewards of our clients’ capital over many years, three of our colleagues stepped back from their portfolio-management responsibilities in August and left the business. While the list of portfolio-management responsibilities within our team looks different now than it did when the quarter began, on a deeper level, nothing has changed: the philosophy and approach that has defined Stewart Investors since 1988 is deeply engrained and continues to define what we do. Our structure is flat. Every member of the investment team is first and foremost an analyst and our collective focus is on identifying high-quality companies, with resilient financials, guided by ambitious stewards. 

Jack Nelson remains this strategy’s lead manager. He continues to apply the same principles to managing it that have guided it since its launch, working as part of the same tight-knit group of investment analysts and drawing on a common pool of investment ideas.

Activity

We added three new holdings to the portfolio over the quarter. There were no complete sales.

In addition to Shopee, the dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, Sea (Singapore: Consumer Discretionary) owns digital entertainment brand Garena and provides digital financial services through SeaMoney. Shopee is increasingly well established around the world, employing 45,000 ‘partner-drivers’ in Brazil.¹ We believe Sea now has an opportunity to expand into new markets as well as increasing the penetration of Shopee and SeaMoney. The company’s founder, Forrest Li, remains closely involved in the business but is now supported by a professional management team. He has built a great franchise backed by solid financials (the company has net cash on its balance sheet) that empowers millions of small businesses to grow and create jobs by giving them direct access to their customers.

We also added a new holding in Motilal Oswal Financial Services (India: Financials), a brokerage and wealth management business that is poised to benefit from the desire of India’s increasingly wealthy middle class to have greater access to capital markets. It is still managed by its founders, including the eponymous Motilal Oswal and we can see a steady growth path ahead for the coming decades. 

The final new position is MakeMyTrip (India: Consumer Discretionary), a leading online travel website. It should benefit from a continuing shift in India towards booking travel online. Meanwhile, as the disposable incomes of Indian consumers grow, they will increasingly want to travel overseas as well as domestically. While it is 49% owned by Trip.com, the Chinese online travel business, the company’s founders remain involved in the business’s day-to-day activities, supported by a professional management team. It is already a leader in the online travel space in India but the real growth opportunity lies in the offline segment, specifically in bus and hotel bookings, many of which continue to be made in bricks-and-mortar travel agencies. 

[1] Source: Sea Shopee Celebrates 5 Years in Brazil, Strengthening Income Generation and Entrepreneurial Growth.

We sold the holding in Jerónimo Martins, the Portuguese-listed owner of Poland’s Biedronka supermarket chain and of Ara in Colombia (around 80% of the group’s revenues are generated in Poland and Colombia)³. We like the company’s management and the outlook for the business, but the stock has performed well and we struggle to see enough growth coming through to warrant the shares’ current valuation.

Elsewhere, we have become increasingly concerned about the outlook for IT services businesses, particularly those with a significant level of exposure to the US. We see a risk that its clients postpone or cancel investments in their IT systems due to the uncertainties currently facing the US economy. As part of our ongoing review of this sector, we also trimmed the holding in Globant (Argentina: Information Technology). We understand the argument that some companies will need IT services businesses to help them to adopt and integrate artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Equally, it may be that its clients actually use AI to replace their existing IT services.

Looking ahead, renewed weakness in the dollar could be the trigger for capital currently domiciled in the US to begin to flow into emerging markets. We remain particularly positive on the prospects for high-quality companies in India. The central bank recently started cutting interest rates, which is a clear positive for demand in rural India. Towards the end of the quarter, we attended a conference of Indian companies and were struck by how positive all of them were about the growth opportunities before them over the next 10 years. In our view, this potential growth – and the size of the Indian market – continues to offer powerful support to valuations.

[1] Source: Financial Times, 30 June 2025 ‘US dollar suffers worst start to year since 1973’.

[2] Source: Straits Times, 21 December 2023 ‘China is world’s second-largest economy but its passport is ranked 63rd. Are things looking up?’.

[3] Source: Jeronimo Martins Operational and Financial Indicators q1 2025.

Elsewhere, we added a handful of new names and trimmed some existing positions. We took some profits in Marico (India: Consumer Staples) and reallocated the capital to Info Edge (India: Communications), Tube Investments (India: Consumer Discretionary), Bajaj Auto (India: Consumer Discretionary) and Bajaj Holdings & Investment (India: Financials). These companies had been on our focus list for a while but their valuations had dissuaded us from establishing positions. InfoEdge is a technology company whose online jobs portal caters to 132,000 corporate customers and hosts around 100 million CVs². It also has property, matchmaking and educational portals. Tube Investments is an industrial conglomerate whose share price had fallen sharply, providing us with what we believe is an excellent entry point. Bajaj Auto had also sold off allowing us to add this leading manufacturer of motorcycles, scooters and auto rickshaws, which is backed by a high-quality steward. Bajaj Holdings & Investment is the holding company of siblings Rajiv and Sanjiv Bajaj. They have demonstrated an exemplary track record of delivering returns for shareholders in autos and financial services.

Elsewhere, we sold convenience store business Dino Polska (Poland: Consumer Staples), which had performed well but which had become too expensive for its long-term growth expectations. We also sold Unicharm (Japan: Consumer Staples). While it has pivoted to adult diapers in response to demographic change, it has found this shift harder than it had originally envisaged.

We built positions in Samsung Biologics (South Korea: Health Care), Alfamart (Indonesia: Consumer Staples), Voltronic Power (Taiwan: Industrials) and BDO Unibank (Philippines: Financials). We believe Samsung Biologics can use the strength of its parent company’s balance sheet to add capacity more quickly than its competitors and win market share. Alfamart is the second biggest player in Indonesia’s convenience-store sector³. It plans to roll out new stores across the country over the next decade. Its shares sold off as the market took fright at Indonesia’s new government but we can see a clear and dependable growth path before it. Voltronic Power makes uninterruptible power supply units (PSUs). We expect demand for these to increase steadily as a new generation of data centres is built worldwide. Finally, BDO Unibank is the Philippines’ largest lender⁴. It is backed the Sy family, who we believe are great long- term stewards.

While we are broadly positive on the outlook for emerging markets, we recognise that there is likely to be ongoing volatility for as long as ‘top-down’ uncertainty – inspired by trade tariffs and geopolitical flux – remains at elevated levels. Valuations are certainly attractive and there remains plenty of domestically driven growth in the markets we favour. Our task is to block out the short-term noise to focus on the underlying quality, growth and stewardship of the companies we invest in.

[1] Source: FactSet as of 31 March 2025.

[2] Source: InfoEdge: Annual Report 2023-24.

[3] Source: Fitch Ratings Fitch Revises Alfamart's Outlook to Positive; Affirms at 'AA(idn)'.

[4] Source : BDO Unibank – Company Profile (as of 31 December 2024).