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Asia Pacific Sustainability
This strategy aims to deliver long-term capital growth by investing in companies in the Asia Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand but excluding Japan.
Originally launched in December 2005, this equity-only strategy aims to deliver long-term capital growth by investing in between 30-60 companies in the Asia Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand but excluding Japan. As with all of our strategies, we are looking for businesses that are well positioned to contribute to, and benefit from, sustainable development.
Strategy highlights: a focus on quality and sustainability
- Companies must contribute to sustainable development. Portfolio Explorer >
- We invest in high-quality companies with exceptional cultures, strong franchises and resilient financials. How we pick companies >
- We avoid companies linked to harmful activities and engage and vote for positive change. Our position on harmful products >
- Our approach is long-term, bottom-up, high conviction and benchmark agnostic
- We focus on capital preservation as well as capital growth – we define risk as the permanent loss of client capital
Latest insights
Quarterly update
Strategy update: Q3 2024
Asia Pacific Sustainability strategy update: 1 July - 30 September 2024
Over most three-month periods, there should be relatively little change in the portfolio. We aim to build resilient portfolios of high-quality companies with diversified streams of cash flows that have the ability to grow in value over the long term.
During the last few days of the quarter the Chinese central bank and government announced monetary and fiscal stimulus measures for the economy, causing Chinese stocks to rally significantly. Whilst it is heartening to see the Chinese authorities attempting to address the issues within the economy it remains unclear whether this stimulus will adequately address structural issues like the lack of consumer demand.
The portfolio purchased ICICI Lombard (India: Financials), a conservatively run insurer set to potentially benefit from rising insurance penetration in India. We purchased Ayala (Philippines: Industrials), a 190-year-old Filipino conglomerate stewarded by the Ayala family who in recent years have appointed the first ever non-family CEO. We also initiated a position in Yiheda Automation (China: Industrials), China’s leading supplier of factory automation components that we believe has the opportunity to consolidate a largely informal market whilst benefiting from the automation of Chinese factories.
During the quarter we continued to add to Techtronic Industries (Hong Kong: Industrials) and increased our position in Tata Communications (India: Communication Services).
We controlled the position size of our large holding in Mahindra & Mahindra (India: Consumer Discretionary), and also trimmed Cochlear (Australia: Health Care), Chroma ATE (Taiwan: Information Technology), Syngene (India: Health Care), Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (New Zealand: Health Care), and Unicharm (Japan: Consumer Staples).
We sold RBL Bank (India: Financials) and Unilever Indonesia (Indonesia: Consumer Staples), both of which were smaller positions that we struggled to build conviction in. We also sold Kotak Mahindra Bank (India: Financials) to fund better ideas elsewhere.