Ian Warmerdam and Ronan Kelleher, Managers of the Henderson Global Growth Strategy, believe that concentrating on secular growth in 2016, particularly within innovative themes, while maintaining a strict valuation discipline, is a prudent approach to generating attractive long-term returns.
What lessons have you learned from 2015?
2015 has again felt like a year of mediocre global economic growth, broadly speaking, and we believe that companies that are reliant solely on a cyclical upturn to grow their revenues present an elevated level of risk. This year has reinforced our belief that concentrating on truly secular growth, while maintaining a strict valuation discipline, is a prudent approach to generating attractive long-term returns.
Are you more or less positive than you were this time last year, and why?
We claim no ability to predict the short-term direction of the markets so our strategy remains unchanged. We continue to operate with our five-year investment horizon at a stock level and have confidence that our philosophy and process will continue to deliver strong absolute and relative returns over this longer-term timeframe.
What are the key themes likely to shape your asset class going forward and how are you likely to position your portfolios as a result?
Our strategy remains to avoid making major macroeconomic calls, and to instead focus on using our bottom-up approach to find companies that are benefitting from underappreciated secular growth and high barriers to entry, at attractive valuations. As we look into 2016, we continue to see compelling investment opportunities within our five existing themes: Healthcare Innovation, Internet Transformation, Emerging Markets Growth, Paperless Payment and Energy Efficiency.
Within Healthcare Innovation, for example, we are attracted by the demographic changes at play as an ageing global population struggles to contain ever rising healthcare costs. Increases in life expectancy mean that the global 60+ age group is expected to double by 2050 to two billion people. CVS Health, the US pharmacy chain, provides an integrated healthcare service for its customers and looks set to benefit from these demographic shifts.
Rightmove is a leading online UK property listings company that sits within our Internet Transformation theme and should continue to benefit from the structural shift in advertising spend from offline to online. Within Energy Efficiency investments include companies that increase vehicle efficiency such as Continental, a Germany-based automotive supplier, Valeo, a multi-national automotive supplier based in France, along with Delphi, a US auto component manufacturer.
