Out of
Our Minds

Ideas, arguments, and musings from inside Harding Loevner.
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Compass Group’s Scale Helps It Win Catering Customers

Compass Group, a new holding in the Harding Loevner Global Equity strategy, is the largest food-catering company in the world. Based in Chertsey, England, the business provides everything from corporate dining to stadium concessions—including at Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea Football Club—to food services for hospitals, retirement homes, universities such as Texas A&M, and even offshore oil rigs.

While some of its rivals have recognizable names—Aramark, Sodexo—the global food-service industry is still so fragmented that Compass’s 15% market share is 2.5 times that of the next-largest player. This scale is a key competitive advantage because it allows Compass to earn attractive margins while providing better service at better prices than competitors, and lower than the cost of a business managing its food needs in-house (which many still do). Customers that outsource their catering to Compass tend to be loyal—96% renew their contracts. This high retention rate along with Compass’s demonstrated ability to pass on inflationary cost increases to customers are evidence of its strong bargaining power over buyers.

Food service isn’t a particularly fast-growing industry, but Compass has plenty of room to increase its market share by converting more self-operators to customers as well as by using its strong balance sheet to acquire smaller competitors. The company has been a serial acquirer but also a smart one. Its sales have continued to grow at a high-single-digit rate through a combination of M&A and winning new business, and the stock has risen at a compound annual rate of 9% (in US dollars) over the past decade.

Streaming’s Road to Profitability

In the pre-streaming era, cable companies wielded enormous pricing power over consumers by building regional monopolies with few substitutes. Today, Netflix, Disney, and others are attempting to capture the same profit pool that was once controlled by those cable providers. To do so, scale is crucial.

But achieving scale isn’t as easy as loading up an app with as many good shows and movies as possible. Content is expensive, and the formula for profitability is simple: number of subscribers multiplied by average revenue per user minus content costs. Disney overspent on content during the pandemic years in a race to add subscribers. Because of this, the frenzied spending on content has abated. According to Harding Loevner analysts Uday Cheruvu, CFA, and Igor Tishin, PhD, Netflix has shown that to achieve scale and remain profitable, a service needs to offer a sufficient breadth and depth of content so that every person in a household finds the service useful and there is no incentive to cancel—but not so much that it becomes too costly to produce. Watch the videos above for highlights from their discussion at the Harding Loevner 2024 Investor Forum.

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BBVA Takes a Risk By Going Hostile

BBVA is Spain’s second-largest bank and wants to get bigger. Management thought a good way to do that would be to buy its rival Sabadell, Spain’s fourth-largest bank. The resulting firm would be Spain’s second-largest bank, with a roughly US$70 billion market cap, 100 million customers around the world, and US$1 trillion in assets. Sabadell’s management, however, was not so taken with the idea, and rejected the offer.

After being rebuffed on its US$12.9 billion “friendly” offer at the beginning of May—a 30% premium to Sabadell’s market cap at the time—BBVA came back with a US$13.1 billion offer that it plans to present directly to Sabadell shareholders, bypassing management. This kind of hostile merger is a rarity among banks. Mergers are risky enough on their own. Hostile mergers amplify those risks, and hostile mergers in the highly regulated world of banking amplify them even further.

Analyst Isaac May presents a few of the biggest reasons why hostile mergers for banks can be risky, and portfolio manager Moon Surana presents counterarguments for why BBVA might be able to overcome those risks.

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Chipmaking Is Getting More Complex. Daifuku’s Smart Monorails Keep Fabs Running Smoothly

In semiconductor manufacturing, a single speck of dust poses a threat to production. It’s why cleanrooms, the sterile labs where silicon wafers get etched and cut into pieces, and then packaged as finished chips—with thousands of steps in between—contain few humans. To reduce the risk of contamination and defects, materials are largely transported by automated monorail systems that travel along the ceiling.

Source: Daifuku.
While advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have put a spotlight on the companies that design and manufacture chips, as well as their data-center customers, providers of cleanroom technology play an increasingly critical role in a world of high-performance computing. Not only is the industry for cleanroom automation characterized by an attractive competitive structure, but new trends and challenges in chipmaking are also improving the growth outlook for this specialized material-handling technology. One player in particular may stand to benefit, and that is Daifuku.

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TOMRA Struggles to Save the World and Turn a Profit

TOMRA built a business that has benefitted its shareholders and the environment. The Asker, Norway-based company sells “reverse vending machines” that collect used soda cans and other recyclables as well as advanced sorting systems, such as those used in recycling plants to sift through waste and find reusable material. It was founded in 1972 and its growth has benefitted from and mirrored the environmental movement that began in the 1970s. In the half century since, TOMRA has expanded into more than 100 markets around the world, making money for its shareholders while helping clean up the planet.

TOMRA has a dominant business position. The company’s scale, brand, and service network are difficult to match for smaller competitors or new entrants. It has a 70% global market share in reverse vending machines, and roughly 50% of the market for sorting machines. A third division focuses on adapting its sorting technology for production and processing in the food industry.

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The Magnificent Seven Skew Market Returns, Style Factors

A small group of US stocks, dubbed the Magnificent Seven, continues to dominate returns in global markets. As seen in the chart above, nearly half of the gains in the MSCI All Country World Index for the first six months of 2024, and all of the gains in the second quarter, came from just these seven stocks.

The phenomenon is not new, although it has become more extreme this year. The Magnificent Seven has accounted for about a third of the index’s return since the end of 2022:

The significant outperformance of the Magnificent Seven has skewed style factors, particularly growth.

How Retailers Are Managing Disruption by China’s Shein, Temu

The following is based on a panel discussion among our retail analysts at the Harding Loevner 2024 Investor Forum.

The three most important considerations for companies in the retail industry are product, price, and place. This is because a retailer generally differentiates itself through what it sells, how much it charges, or how convenient it is for customers to shop there. Therefore, when new rivals enter the industry, they tend to target perceived shortcomings in one or more of these areas.

The clearest example of how these dynamics can play out has been the rise of e-commerce over the past two decades. Websites such as Amazon.com were able to take market share from store-based retailers by providing shoppers a greater assortment, price transparency and savings, and the ability to shop from their homes.

Now, a new class of online retailers is finding room to further disrupt the 3Ps of retail by offering deep discounts on trendy apparel and other impulse purchases. They include Shein, a company that is aiming to go public soon, Temu, a subsidiary of China’s PDD Holdings, as well as TikTok Shop, a shopping feature that was added to the namesake social-media app owned by China’s ByteDance. (While Shein has moved its headquarters to Singapore, its operations are also primarily in China.) All three cross-border operators are bringing specific competitive advantages to large retail markets such as the US and Brazil.

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Nigerian Banks Look for Inflection Point

Nigeria offers frontier and emerging-market investors enticing opportunities. It is a resource-rich nation with Africa’s largest population and fourth-largest economy. But when a country has gone through as many ups and downs as Nigeria has, signs of progress should be looked at cautiously.

Since last year’s election of former Lagos governor Bola Tinubu to the presidency, Nigeria has implemented a series of economic reforms designed to stabilize the country after a decade of mismanagement and allow it to profit from its own potential. What we as investors are looking for is the proverbial inflection point, a time when the reforms start producing tangible economic benefits. That would be good for the nation in general, and it would also be particularly good for Zenith Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, and other large, high-quality Nigerian banks.

Over the Barrel: The Complex Task of Decarbonizing the World

Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of modern society, used for everything from heating homes to powering cars and planes to generating the electricity that keeps the internet running. Crude oil, natural gas, and coal currently meet about 80% of our energy needs globally, but 75% of carbon dioxide emissions come from finding and burning these fossil fuels. There is a consensus about transitioning away from those sources of energy, given how much they contribute to climate change, but there is not a consensus on how much our reliance upon them can be cut or what will replace them. There does not appear to be one clear replacement and there will likely be multiple pathways to decarbonizing the global economy. To understand our energy future, it is helpful to have a perspective on past efforts to develop new energy sources. In this excerpt from the 2024 Harding Loevner Investor Forum, our analysts offer some perspective on the history of energy transition.

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Mobileye Steers Closer to Autonomous Driving

The road to creating fully autonomous vehicles has been plagued by technological obstacles and accidents. Apple scrapped its decade-long electric vehicle project this year after reportedly struggling to create a self-driving car. Last October, a pedestrian in San Francisco was trapped under a driverless car operated by Cruise, which is majority owned by General Motors. And Tesla has been the target of lawsuits and regulatory investigations due to fatal accidents involving cars equipped with its Autopilot feature.

When most people think of automation in driving, they think of cars that could operate anywhere without a human driver, or what the Society of Automotive Engineers calls “Level 5 automation.” But many cars on the road today offer some level of automation, whether it’s lane centering features or adaptive cruise control, or both. The key distinction in these so-called Level 1 and Level 2 systems is that these features support the driver, rather than replacing the driver as the higher levels would.

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What If Fashion Were Taxed Like Cigarettes?

The fast-fashion industry produces a lot of waste but has largely avoided any consequences for its impact on the environment. That is starting to change.

The lower house of France’s Parliament passed a bill in February that would impose a “sin tax” of up to 10 euros or 50% of the selling price on fast-fashion clothing, a severe penalty given that many of these products cost less than €10. The bill would also ban advertising and demands that companies in the industry disclose the environmental impact of their businesses. The bill was approved unanimously and moved to the upper house of Parliament. If it becomes law, it will make France one of the first countries to impose this type of penalty on fast-fashion companies.

India’s Net-Zero Progress

Maria Lernerman, CFA, portfolio manager for our Global Paris-Aligned and International Carbon Transition Equity strategies, recently traveled to India to observe the country’s emission reduction initiatives first-hand. In this video, she shares thoughts from her trip and highlights hurdles that the country must overcome to progress toward net-zero status.

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At Costco, Lower Prices, Higher Club Fees May Stoke Competition

Until recently, Costco charged US$16.99 for a 24-pack of San Pellegrino. Now, that same item retails for US$14.99—a 12% reduction.

Sparkling water isn’t the only product looking cheaper at Costco these days. During a quarterly earnings call in March, Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti seemed to signal an inflection point when he rattled off a variety of goods for which prices were being lowered: Kirkland batteries (from US$17.99 down to US$15.99) and reading glasses (US$18.99 to US$16.99), as well as sporting goods and lawn-care products. A bag of frozen fruit was even reduced by US$4. Plus, there was a more subtle clue about the direction of retail pricing: inflation was mentioned just seven times on the call, compared with 35 times during the March 2023 earnings call. (As for the recent trade disruptions in the Panama Canal and Red Sea, management said this hadn’t pushed up prices because of the long-term nature of shipping contracts.)

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NVIDIA’s Competitive Structure May Be More Fragile Than Its Valuation Implies

Advances in artificial intelligence have created an AI gold rush, and one company—NVIDIA—supplies the necessary picks and shovels. With a dominant position in a fast-growing market, shares of NVIDIA have soared. However, NVIDIA’s competitive advantage may be more fragile than its stock price indicates.

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Quality Is Becoming More Affordable in China, Less So In India

While challenges in China persist, Chinese companies look better than China’s economy.

Some key parts of the Chinese economy continue to stabilize. Manufacturing activities expanded in March for the first time in six months, led by new orders from domestic customers as well as by export orders. The government is pushing for more domestic production in strategic industries such as green technology and advanced manufacturing. Growth in services activities has remained good, with travel and tourism continuing to rebound. We are also seeing increasing localization as Chinese companies prefer Chinese suppliers over multinational corporations to de-risk their own supply chain. This is leading to domestic market-share gains for many companies. Finally, valuations for some high-quality companies look compelling at these levels.

Quality growth stocks in China have derated significantly since 2019 and are now trading at a nearly 40% discount to developed-market counterparts and emerging markets (EMs) as a whole. Conversely, while valuations of Indian companies have moderated slightly over the past year, they continue to be expensive relative to the rising valuations in developed markets. Quality growth stocks in India still trade at a significant premium to other EMs.

India’s evolving economy is promising, as witnessed by our analysts on a recent trip to the country; however, the stock market rally in response has probably gone too far, especially with regards to small and mid-cap stocks. Today, valuations remain stretched across most sectors.

Note: Top QG quadrant is defined as companies with a QR score > 0.5 and a GR score > 0.5. VR Score based on weighted average.

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Chips of the Trade: TSMC, Samsung Benefit from AI Demand

In international markets, a big theme of investor interest relates to companies developing the underlying technology that powers AI. This includes the designers and manufacturers of the advanced semiconductors necessary to run AI, as well as producers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and providers of the critical computing infrastructure required by AI systems.

Expectations are that semiconductor industry revenue growth will accelerate to annualized double-digit levels this decade, spurred by demand for AI chips. This would be a growth rate well above levels that we’ve seen since the mid-1990s, with predictions that the roughly US$50 billion dollars of AI chips sold in 2023 could rise to US$400 billion dollars of sales before the end of the decade.

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Amazon’s Latest Logistical Feat Delivers Long-Term Profit Gains

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) captures investors’ curiosity, Amazon’s AWS web-services division has been in the spotlight. How the performance of AWS is affected by the growth in AI is important because even though the business accounts for less than 20% of Amazon’s overall revenue, it has been the source of most of the company’s profits in recent years.

But with so much focus on AI, what is perhaps under-appreciated is that Amazon’s e-commerce business recently underwent a transformation of its own—a rethinking of how it gets customers’ packages from point A to point B. Because of this new strategy, the business, where profitability has been low and erratic, may be on the cusp of a new era in which margins finally reach—and sustain—an attractive level.

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Baidu Abandons Moonshots to Search for Earthly Profits

In early January, Chinese internet giant Baidu surprised markets with the news that it was donating a cutting-edge quantum computer, the lab where it was built, and all the associated technology to the Chinese government.

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Ramadan’s Shifting Dates Have Complex Effects on Businesses

The holy month of Ramadan affects companies and products differently each year, and it is essential for investors in Muslim-majority countries to understand these effects. The holiday, during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, starts 10-12 days earlier each year, unlike fixed holidays such as Christmas. This year, Ramadan starts at sunset on March 10 and lasts until April 9.

Ramadan’s Slowly Shifting Seasonality

Timing of Ramadan relative to Northern Hemisphere seasons, 2010-2040

The fact that the holy month moves each year means that the effects of Ramadan on businesses change over time. Recently, when Ramadan was during the summer, it was a significant headwind for companies such as brewers, as the fast suppressed demand for beer during what would otherwise be a peak month. But now as Ramadan is moving earlier in the year, that headwind will lessen.

Learn more about Ramadan’s effect on businesses in Muslim-majority countries, or those with significant Muslim populations, in our extended analysis.

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Fewer Babies Means Better Business for Diaper Maker

Japan has been undergoing a baby bust for decades. In the early 1970s, there were years where more than 2 million babies were born in Japan, but since then, those numbers have declined steadily. By the 1990s, there were about 1.2 million babies born each year in Japan, while in 2022, births fell below 800,000 for the first time.

Source: The Statistics Bureau of Japan
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Can a Raw Deal Be Good for Netflix?

Did Netflix just put a headlock on the entertainment industry? On January 23, the company announced a US$5 billion deal to stream the professional wresting show Raw and other programs from World Wrestling Entertainment, expanding into live sports programming (the recent sexual-assault allegations against WWE founder Vince McMahon, which led to his resignation from the board of WWE’s parent company, appear unlikely to derail the partnership).

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Japan Digging Out of Chronic Deflation One IT Worker at a Time

In Japan, it’s common for an employee to work for the same company for their entire career. Indeed, lifetime employment has been a central feature of the nation’s economy since World War II, and with such limited job mobility, nominal wages haven’t grown for three decades.

Analyzing Industry Structure through Porter’s Five Forces Model

As bottom-up investors, we aim to invest in high-quality growth businesses at reasonable prices to provide superior risk-adjusted returns over the long term. To determine what constitutes a high-quality growth business, we research a company’s management, financial strength, growth prospects, and we closely examine the industry in which it operates to determine the company’s competitive advantage.

It’s as important to examine a company’s industry as it is to examine the fundamentals of a company. An analysis of industry structure can inform how well-positioned a company is relative to competitors, as well as the profit potential for the company.

Our analysis is guided by Harvard University professor Michael Porter’s Five Forces, which were first introduced in a 1979 issue of Harvard Business Review and later detailed in his 1980 book, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors.

In this six-part video series, we examine each Porter Force and discuss how we use them to analyze industries. Watch the series introduction below and click through to see how we leverage Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework for industry analysis.

Japan’s Past Hints at China’s Future

China faces a demographic shift similar to Japan three decades ago. Portfolio manager Jingyi Li explains how that comparison can help guide investors looking at China today.

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NVIDIA and the Cautionary Tale of Cisco Systems

NVIDIA, the giant semiconductor company founded by Taiwanese American Jensen Huang, seems invincible these days. Annual revenue has more than doubled since 2020. Its stock price has more than doubled this year and is up more than 700% over the past five years. It is one of the rare trillion-dollar market-cap companies.

Competitive Advantage and Pricing Power

Portfolio manager Jingyi Li discusses how several Global Equities portfolio companies are using their pricing power to navigate through this period of higher interest rates and higher inflation.

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The Democratic Republic of The Congo Could Be the Next Big Frontier Market, Eventually

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has abundant natural resources, rich farmland, and the powerful Congo River, has the potential to become the renewable-energy hub for the entire world and Africa’s breadbasket. I toured Kenya and the DRC in July on a trip organized by Nairobi-based Equity Bank, which operates a subsidiary in the DRC. As an analyst of frontier-market companies, what I saw intrigued me. The DRC is a nation with vast potential, as well as significant hurdles to overcome.

Navigating Conflict in the Middle East

Portfolio manager Anix Vyas, CFA, discusses how the current conflict in the Middle East is affecting International Small Companies portfolio holding CyberArk.

Chinese Companies Look Better than China’s Economy

In 2023, Chinese markets have been roiled by continued trade tensions, slowing economic growth, and deleveraging in the property sector. Despite this difficult backdrop, there are reasons to be optimistic about the growth prospects of some Chinese companies. Portfolio Managers Andrew West, CFA, and Lee Gao discuss their current perspectives on China with Portfolio Specialist Apurva Schwartz, including how they weigh the opportunities and risks of investing in the market.

Slowdown in Economic Growth

Real estate, the biggest source of wealth for Chinese consumers, was in bubble territory and has been slowing for a while. This has negatively affected consumer confidence and household consumption.

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Cable Strikes Back

Most people viewed the recent contentious negotiations between Walt Disney and Charter Communications like a prize fight: two combatants, one winner.

I see it differently. Viewed through the lens of Michael Porter’s competitive forces, which we use at Harding Loevner to analyze industry dynamics, the dispute was a clear example of a change in the bargaining power of buyers amid the changing economics of streaming services.

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Ozempic and the Substitution Trade

The diabetes drug Ozempic has made headlines recently as the secret behind several slimmed-down stars of the Bravo network’s “Real Housewives” franchise. Tabloid fodder doesn’t usually matter to investors, but the story of Ozempic is one worth reading.

The twist is that Ozempic, a trade name for semaglutide, is a diabetes drug, not an obesity drug. Semaglutide is however effective in inducing weight loss; its creator Novo Nordisk markets a separate version called Wegovy specifically for obesity. Wegovy became so popular there were shortages of it, so doctors began prescribing Ozempic “off label” for a condition other than its intended use. That popularity fueled Novo Nordisk shares and this month it pushed past LVMH as Europe’s most valuable company.

Growth Opportunities from Electrification

Portfolio manager Scott Crawshaw highlights several companies in our Emerging Markets portfolio that are poised to benefit from increasing electrical power demand.

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Meta Accelerates Its AI Game

Meta has been quieter about its artificial-intelligence-focused endeavors this year than some of its big-tech peers like Microsoft and NVIDIA, but it expects just as massive a transformation of its business from the much-hyped technology.

In its second-quarter earnings conference call, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg detailed how AI permeates the company. For example, nearly all of Meta’s advertisers now use at least one AI-based product, allowing them, for instance, to personalize and customize ads. He also touted an increase of 7% in time spent on Facebook after launching AI-recommended content from accounts that users don’t follow.

Now the company plans an aggressive push of its own version of generative AI, the kinds of large language models that have gotten so much attention lately. In July, the company released an open-source—i.e., free for even commercial use—generative AI platform called Llama 2, which Meta hopes will emerge as a competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4. Meta is betting its platform will unleash users’ creative potential and result in a flood of content. If that occurs, Meta’s powerful algorithms for matching content with users—4 billion of them across all of its platforms—will become indispensable as a content-discovery tool with a rich set of monetization options from advertising to ecommerce to subscriptions.

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Generative AI Through a Fundamental-Research Lens

The following is an excerpt from our second-quarter report for the Global Equity strategy. Click here to read the full report.

Anyone who has interacted with popular AI models—asked them about the mysteries of life and the cosmos or created convincing Van Gogh replicas using AI-enabled image generators—can sense that we may be in the midst of a technological revolution. That prospect has consumed equity markets lately, with seven US tech-related stocks responsible for most of the market appreciation in the second quarter.

As an investor in high-quality, growing businesses, we have always tried to position this portfolio to benefit from secular trends, the kind that transcend economic cycles and are driven by fundamental changes in key areas such as tech. Still, it is incredibly difficult for anyone to predict how such trends will unfold; the vicissitudes of cryptocurrency are a sobering reminder of this. Furthermore, as seen with the rise of the internet and, later, mobile connectivity, technology is merely a platform; it’s the applications of the technology that eventually determine many of the winners and losers. In the case of generative AI, some of the future applications may not yet be conceivable, although many companies, even outside the tech field, are now pondering the possibilities.

India: Four Takeaways from Our Travels

With high GDP growth and a rapidly expanding industrial base, there is a lot of optimism about the Indian economy. And having passed China earlier this year as the world’s most populous nation, there is the potential for a “demographic dividend” to bolster that growth in the coming decades. Recently, three Harding Loevner colleagues traveled to India to talk to companies and see conditions on the ground for themselves. In the video series below, portfolio manager and analyst Jafar Rizvi and analysts Sean Contant and Chris Nealand discuss what they saw on their trip and their perspectives on India with portfolio specialist Apurva Schwartz.

Vietnam’s Labor Costs, Taxes Attract Chinese Manufacturers

Portfolio Manager Wenting Shen, CFA, and Portfolio Specialist Apurva Schwartz discuss why Chinese companies are relocating production facilities to Southeast Asia. Watch the rest of their conversation.

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What P&G’s Pricing Decisions Tell Us About Inflation

Inflation has been the relentless economic theme of the last two years. Even with interest rates higher than before the pandemic, global supply chains no longer paralyzed by virus-related bottlenecks, and the World Health Organization declaring an end to the COVID-19 emergency, prices for goods and services in many parts of the world continue to climb.

As the world’s largest consumer-goods company, Procter & Gamble provides insight into what’s driving the pricing decisions at big brands.

How Are Earnings of Emerging Markets Companies Holding Up?

Portfolio manager Pradipta Chakrabortty discusses the earnings bright spots within emerging markets regions and sectors.

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Small Caps: Adventures in Fundamental Research

How do you begin to research a company when so little information is readily available beyond a name and a set of regulatory filings? This is the challenge that defines small-cap investing, an asset class that invariably entails an adventure in fundamental research.

The superheroes of the stock market—mainly US corporations valued at or close to a trillion dollars—tend to dominate investment news and research. And yet little-known small companies—often based outside the US—that never generate a headline remain some of the most vibrant sources of innovation. If the biggest large caps sell the finished products that investors and consumers know well, small caps often occupy a small niche along the global supply chain, providing a critical piece of technology known only to its intended audience.

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Macro Do’s and Don’ts

This commentary is excerpted from the Harding Loevner Third Quarter 2022 International Report.

One of our more acid-tongued colleagues likes to observe that “just because we don’t do macro, it doesn’t mean the macro cannot do us.” The observation is a challenge to our bottom-up investment philosophy and merits a response. What does his comment really mean? Is he correct?

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Going Home: An Account from China’s “Zero-COVID” Frontline

Prior to COVID-19, Wenting Shen travelled to China regularly to visit managements of current and prospective investments. Round-trip travel to China from the US was impossible during the first two years of COVID-19, but recent easing of US travel restrictions encouraged her to plan a trip. With seats going fast, she snagged one on a flight from Newark to Shanghai for March 30. After three negative PCR tests over seven days at a Chinese-government-approved clinic in Queens, New York, she was ready to fly.

But days before Shen’s departure, new complications arose: outbreaks of the Omicron variant in several Chinese cities, including Shanghai, were prompting citywide lockdowns. The flight was still due to depart, but had been rerouted to Fuzhou, a coastal city across the strait from Taiwan, 450 miles to the Southwest.

The natural—some would say, prudent—decision at this point might have been to postpone her trip. But Shen, worried she might not easily get another ticket, pressed ahead. Here are her travel bulletins.

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A Ground’s Eye View on Inflation and Its Persistence

The pandemic sowed the seeds of today’s inflation. That much is clear. Last year, fear and government-mandated lockdowns sparked a global recession. Businesses rushed to cut production ahead of an anticipated slowdown in consumption, or were hobbled by forced plant closings, anxious workers, or snarled logistics. But the sheer sweep of the income support in many developed countries meant that household incomes didn’t fall nearly as far as had been expected based on the rise in unemployment. Unable to spend on services like eating out and travel, consumers flush with cash turned to buying, or attempting to buy, big-ticket goods and better houses.

The outsized demand for durable goods has run headlong into the diminished supply. While the springboard for price increases may have been reduced supply, the strength and persistence of those increases, which are now feeding through to labor markets, are raising the specter that aggregate demand is outpacing even normalized aggregate supply. There is precious little that monetary policy can do to counter supply-led inflation, but—Omicron willing—it is likely to be temporary. But if inflation comes to be led by stubborn excess demand, then tight monetary policy is the orthodox response, and we can expect central banks to hit the economy over the head with a brick to prevent a sustained wage-price spiral. Demand-led inflation would have significant implications for asset prices.

Inflation is notoriously difficult to forecast; even some at the US Federal Reserve (Fed) concede that it has no working model for inflation.1 We could do no better and accordingly make no effort to forecast future inflation. What we can do is talk to the companies we own or follow and tease out the impact on their earnings from the rising input costs they’re experiencing; their changing bargaining power vis à vis their suppliers; whether they are able to pass on higher costs to their customers before stifling demand; and how all that is coloring their business outlook. The following represents what our research analysts have been able to glean from those conversations.

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What’s Driving China’s Regulatory Transformation

On the surface, there are few precedents for China’s quick-fire regulatory changes, which over the past few months have transformed everything from e-commerce and education to health care and real estate.

One can only speculate on the reasons for this synchronous timing, but one possibility that stands out is the confluence of the five-year policy and leadership cycles in China. This is the first year of the 2021-25 Five-Year Plan, but more importantly, it is the final full year before the top 200 or so members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China are selected at its National Congress in October 2022. It bears remembering that those politicians are similar to counterparts elsewhere in facing challenges that have diverted them from other priorities. They spent the first two years of their terms coping with escalating US-China trade tensions, and just when “normal order” loomed after the signing of the Phase One trade agreement, COVID-19 hijacked everyone’s lives. Only recently have they gotten a chance to work on much-delayed goals.

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Big Health vs. Big Tech: A Fight over the Future of US Health Care

The $4 trillion US health care system represents both the best and worst of health care globally, responsible for the vast majority of leading-edge treatments and providers as well as high rates of uninsured, a staggering $11,000 in annual expenditures per person, and among the worst levels of infant mortality and life expectancy in the developed world. The system’s structure—a hodgepodge of private employer-subsidized, public, and quasi-public insurers, for-profit and not-for-profit networks and unaffiliated providers—famously incentivizes some providers to ring up higher volumes of procedures while inflating fees to cover the huge overhead required to administer the complexity.

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Too Much Information

In the late 1950s, in his book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Phil Fisher recommended making investment decisions based on “scuttlebutt,” the kind of information an investor could get by asking around. This entailed tracking down and interrogating customers and competitors, employees, and former employees. Doing research, in the sense of gathering evidence and analyzing it to reach a conclusion, was hard work, but enabled analysts committed to such intellectual labor to obtain an edge over their competitors simply by having better, and more complete, information.

Indeed, when I started my career in investing in the late 1970s, obtaining even basic financial info about a German car company still required going to Germany and knocking on the company’s door.

Now gathering information no longer takes much effort. We are deluged by floods of data—not only the details of prices, volumes, margins, and capital investments of individual companies, but also highly granular data about credit card receipts, numbers of cars in parking lots, or words used in media reports. These new, “alternative” sources of information have briefly given some stock pickers a slight edge in predicting short-term stock price movements. The informational advantage provided by such data is but fleeting, however; once this data is commercially accessible to everyone, the advantage disappears. Thus, even for the short-term investor, information gathering itself no longer provides a lasting edge.

For long-term investors, the relationship to information has changed even more fundamentally. You no longer need to seek information; it finds you. Your job, rather, is to act as what Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, called an “intelligent filter”—determining the information that is important and ignoring data that (in the case of the investor) doesn’t help you forecast cash flows and estimate the value of a security.

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When Will Life Return to Normal?

If we are honest with ourselves, it is a question that almost all of us, as investors and people, are probably wondering right about now. In this case, it took the form of the following note from a young colleague based in locked-down London directed to me and my fellow Health Care analyst as part of the daily, ongoing Research Information Group email discussion that has always comprised much of our meeting, brainstorm, and “water-cooler” time here at Harding Loevner.

Considering the challenges of [vaccine] manufacturing and distribution, what would be your best estimate for when developed economies will return to “normality”? I.e., people in developed economies are allowed—and feel safe enough—to live a life more like 2019. E.g., Sept 2021? Jan 2022? Never?

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Out of Our Minds—From the Beginning

People who know a little about the history of our firm sometimes credit us with being ahead of our time. When we set out 30+ years ago we made an early decision that we would only invest in stocks of high-quality companies capable of growing revenues and cash flows over long periods of time, and then only when we could purchase them at reasonable prices. Mind you, this was two years before Eugene Fama and Kenneth French proposed their three-factor model incorporating value, and more than a decade before Cliff Asness’s seminal work on quality or the conflicting studies on the long-term premium provided by growth. So, we weren’t thinking of these aspects of our process as “factors,” or permanent sources of returns, in the current sense of the term. We thought they were merely sensible principles, based on our own beliefs about the markets, that would give us the best chance of achieving the above-market returns necessary to satisfy our clients and sustain our fledgling enterprise. Considering we had left well-paying jobs to stake our futures on these ideas, there were probably some people who thought us out of our minds. And, in a sense, they were right.

Disclosures

“Out of Our Minds” presents the individual viewpoints of members of Harding Loevner on a range of investment topics. For more detailed information regarding particular investment strategies, please visit our website, www.hardingloevner.com. Any views expressed by employees of Harding Loevner are solely their own.

Any discussion of specific securities is not a recommendation to purchase or sell a particular security. Non-performance based criteria have been used to select the securities discussed. It should not be assumed that investment in the securities discussed has been or will be profitable. To request a complete list of holdings for the past year, please contact Harding Loevner.

There is no guarantee that any investment strategy will meet its objective. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

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