Company Reports

Topsports receives more than 80% of its revenue from selling Nike and Adidas products in China. The company operates more than 6,500 stores across China, providing more selection and convenience than any other sportswear retailers. Topsports is Nike and Adidas' largest retail partner in China, helping them reach consumers across hundreds of Chinese cities.

Hasbro continues to hold a leading position in the nearly $30 billion North American retail toy industry (Circana), developing, manufacturing, and marketing well-known global brands that include Transformers, My Little Pony, and Nerf. The firm operates a relatively differentiated business model, thanks to its digital properties exposure, content creation ability, and key licensing arrangements, abilities can be better monetized with the divestiture of Entertainment One (EOne) entertainment-related assets complete. Production capabilities support Hasbro's multimedia presence, as does Discovery Family, a joint venture that brings Hasbro's brands to television, bolstering the firm's brand blueprint strategy. Hasbro has historically dominated the big-screen, building brand loyalty and generating new streams of revenue from its licensing businesses (like Star Wars and Marvel). We think Hasbro and the toy industry have modest runway for growth ahead through international growth (Asia-Pacific and emerging markets still provide longer-term growth potential through share gains) and acquisitions of strategic players that fit into Hasbro's portfolio (for example, D&D Beyond).

China Petroleum & Chemical, better known as Sinopec, is the listed arm of one of China's two integrated oil majors and one of Asia's largest refiners and chemical companies in terms of revenue. Owing in part to historical legacy, Sinopec’s revenue and assets are more heavily weighted toward its downstream activities, and the company relies on external sources of oil to meet its refining and processing needs. As a result, Sinopec’s earnings are generally less sensitive to oil prices swings than peer PetroChina's, and so it benefits less in a rising oil price environment but is also more stable when prices fall.

ANA Holdings’ full-service passenger airline operations should continue to dominate and underpin the group’s revenue and profit. Management is focused on expanding its international passenger services as it reestablishes its international trunk routes post-coronavirus. It expects Japan’s inbound tourism to continue to outpace outbound growth and anticipates that it will also need to provide services to inbound tourists to secondary locations in Japan beyond the current key portals of Tokyo and Osaka. To capture demand growth from inbound travel to Japan from Southeast Asia, ANA is launching the Air Japan brand. Air Japan is expected to compete with Singapore Airlines’ Scoot and Japan Airlines’ Zipair.

JL Mag Rare-Earth is the world’s largest producer of high-performance rare earth permanent magnets, or REPMs, according to Frost & Sullivan. The company started producing high-performance NdFeB PMs used for wind turbines in 2010; for energy-saving variable-frequency air-conditioners, or VFACs, in 2011; and for new energy vehicles, or NEVs, in 2012. Its major customers included all of the top 10 players in the global NEV sector by sales volume, four of the top five players in the global wind power sector by newly added installed capacity, and the top two household air-conditioner producers by production volume in China.

The network partner model-based companies in China have gained parcel volume share from direct operation-based companies, with share rising to 78% in 2023 from 76% in 2022. The six largest express delivery companies controlled around 87% of China’s parcel deliveries by volume in 2023, based on data from the companies and China’s State Post Bureau. With share already high, we think further volume share gain is limited for the network partner model-based companies.

Agnico Eagle is the world’s third-largest gold miner by production, operating mines in Canada, Mexico, Finland, and Australia, reflecting the company’s focus on lower-risk jurisdictions. Its four cornerstone assets each produce roughly 350,000-700,000 ounces of gold annually, consisting of Detour Lake, Canadian Malartic, Meadowbank and Meliadine. All four are in Canada. These mines accounted for around 60% of the company’s production of 3.4 million ounces of gold in 2023, with the company also producing minor amounts of copper, zinc, and silver. Agnico Eagle had about 15 years of gold reserves at end 2023.

TPG Telecom is grappling with structural changes in the Australian telecommunications market. Rollout of the national broadband network, or NBN, and take-up of high-traffic products such as video streaming, will increase the demand for broadband and backhaul capacity. However, the NBN will also force TPG Telecom to become a reseller, hitting its consumer broadband margins.

Since its public listing in 2010, Luxshare Precision has successfully penetrated Apple's supply chain, and Apple’s share of Luxshare’s overall sales has increased to more than 75% in 2023 from less than 10% in 2011. Over the past decade, the company has built up a solid track record at Apple, which has enabled Luxshare to expand its footprint beyond cables and connectors for iPhones and MacBooks to acoustic, haptic, and assembly services for AirPods and Watch. Despite often entering into Apple’s competitive supply chain as a second- or third-sourced player, Luxshare has managed to maintain an average gross margin of 15% between 2019 and 2023. This has contributed to the firm’s average return on invested capital of 20% over the same period.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield was formed in 1968, acquiring several large malls through to 1995 and offices thereafter. In 2000 it launched a conventions and exhibitions business and is now a European leader in the sector. In 2007 Unibail merged with Rodamco, becoming the largest retail REIT in continental Europe.

Vale is the world's largest iron ore miner and a key supplier to the global steel industry. It is leveraged to Chinese raw materials demand, which we expect to slow as the country's infrastructure-led investment boom wanes and as recycled steel becomes a growing source of supply.

CSR is one of Australia’s leading building materials companies, producing bricks, plasterboard, insulation, fiber cement, aerated autoclaved concrete, and a variety of complementary building products. CSR manufactures and distributes recognized brands such as Gyprock plasterboard, PGH bricks, Monier roof tiles, Bradford insulation, and Hebel panels. It also holds a 25% effective interest in the Tomago aluminum smelter in a joint venture. Property development of surplus and excess land is also a key valuation driver, with a property portfolio valued at over AUD 1.5 billion.

China Education Group is one of the largest private higher education providers in China. Over the years, it has built a strong portfolio of higher vocational education schools. Many of CEG's schools are in economically vibrant areas. Large population inflows and low gross enrollment rates create strong demand for quality education in such areas. We expect CEG to continue benefiting from that.

Because of its intangible assets, including brand strength and intellectual property, Porsche has a narrow economic moat rating. The brand is synonymous with motorsports and highly engineered, fun to drive, sports cars. Brand strength has enabled a premium to luxury price range across Porsche's product portfolio, while intellectual property supports the brand image from racing-inspired engineering and well-executed product. Porsche is one of only a handful of automakers to which we assign an economic moat.

Founded in 1993, Longyuan is a pioneer in China’s wind power development. This first-mover advantage, coupled with a capable management team, enabled the firm to secure better wind farm locations, which helps to maximize wind farm utilization rates. Longyuan’s annual wind power utilization hours have consistently outperformed the industry average in China by more than 50 hours during the past decade. Longyuan is the world’s largest wind power producer with consolidated installed wind capacity of about 27.8 gigawatts, or GW, as of end-2023.

Zurich Insurance is one of the best-quality companies in our European insurance coverage, and it is a truly special business. The ownership of Farmers Management Services provides the company with an unusual uplift in returns delivered to shareholders. And we believe this business and these returns are well protected by the long-standing attorney-in-fact agreement. The relationship between Farmers Exchanges and Farmers Management Services has been in place since the exchanges were founded nearly 100 years ago. This makes it unlikely that the relationship will change and any change would have to be agreed by upon every single Farmers Exchange policyholder. That would involve a lot of paperwork. Margins and returns in FMS touch 30% and in the world of insurance that's almost unrivaled.

We view TriNet as well placed to take share of the expansive, fragmented small and midsize business payroll and human capital management market, through industry consolidation and rising demand for comprehensive, outsourced solutions. Regional providers or do-it-yourself solutions such as Intuit’s QuickBooks or Microsoft Excel service most of the small-business market, creating meaningful scope for greater penetration by value-added providers like TriNet.

Roper Technologies compounds cash flow by acquiring leading businesses in niche markets with durable competitive advantages and redeploying excess cash to acquire additional businesses with incrementally higher rates of return. The firm has pivoted from a legacy industrial base to a diversified technology company dominated by sticky software companies with wide economic moats, including multiple firms with gross retention rates above 95%.

Before its 2017 merger with Swift Transportation, Knight Transportation was the 12th-largest full-truckload carrier in the United States, with a history of exceptional execution, including average return on invested capital in the low teens—an unusual accomplishment in trucking. Knight's long-standing laser focus on network efficiency has served it well; its legacy operating ratio, or OR, (expenses/revenue, excluding fuel) averaged in the mid-80% range before the Swift deal, versus an industry average that traditionally exceeds 90%.

L3Harris Technologies is the sixth-largest US defense contractor by sales. It formed in 2019 from the merger of L-3 Technologies, a sensormaker that operated a decentralized business focused on inorganic growth, and the Harris Corporation, a sensor and radio manufacturer that ran a more unified business. Underpinning the merger was an assumption that additional scale would primarily generate cost synergies and eventually, the firms could produce meaningful revenue synergies. With the recent addition of ViaSat's tactical data link business and most recently the $4.7 billion acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, L3Harris has opportunistically vaulted its strategy forward into becoming a more well-rounded defense prime contractor, adding munitions, space exploration, and hypersonic missile components and capabilities to its very radio- and communications-heavy base. That said, Aerojet supplies components to many other defense contractors, which isn't likely to change, and competes with the space segment of Northrop Grumman. We think it will take time for meaningful revenue synergies that weren't already in the backlog for L3Harris, ViaSat, or Aerojet to materialize.