UPDATE: Brian Lum took over from Praveen Kumar as lead manager in May 2025.
Baillie Gifford Shin Nippon (BGS) was launched in 1985 to invest in Japanese smaller companies. It caught the tail end of the 1980s boom in Japanese stocks and then endured a volatile two decades as the bubble steadily deflated. In the twelve years following the financial crisis, BGS produced an astonishing 18-fold gain but since 2021 it has significantly underperformed its benchmark and its shares have more than halved as investors turned away from Baillie Gifford's distinctive style of growth investing. BGS traded ...
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Nippon Active Value Fund (ticker: NAVF) was launched in early 2020 raising £103m just before the pandemic struck. Similar to AVI Japan Opportunity, NAVF looks to invest in undervalued Japanese smaller companies whose share prices should benefit from the ongoing corporate governance reforms being pushed by both the Japanese government and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. NAVF has a concentrated portfolio of around 30 stocks, heavily tilted toward the industrials and materials sectors. Its shares have performed very strongly since their IPO, despite the weakness of the Japanese yen, resulting in two ot...
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AVI Japan Opportunity (ticker: AJOT) was launched in 2018 to unlock the hidden value lurking within many Japanese smaller companies, where cash and investments often account for a large proportion of their market cap. Reforms aimed at improving corporate governance in Japan were first introduced back in 2013 but they have been ramped up steadily in recent years although there is still some hostility from companies towards outside investors that agitate for change. AJOT seeks to build a consensus opinion on the changes it thinks are needed at each company it invests in, with most discussions ta...
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