Future Stocks: Our best international ideas

Andrew Brown: So the international equity investment universe, which is defined as the world excluding the US, offers a vast amount of opportunities for growth investors. There’s some world-class companies. They often trade at lower valuations than a similar business that we see listed in the US. You get opportunity to invest in very different types of growth because it’s such a varied landscape that we have available ahead of us.

MIPS

MIPS is a Swedish company that plays a very important part in helmet safety. So you'll see that little yellow dot, which signifies it's got the MIPS technology inside. It's a bit like Intel inside in a computer. And actually they work with 91 out of the top 100 helmet manufacturers in sports now. We were really drawn to the potential size of the opportunity here and the quality of the company. They do 15,000 tests a year to constantly demonstrate the success of their products. And they’ve also developed very strong relationships with the helmet manufacturers themselves. So the safety market is multiples of the size of the sports helmet market. The long-term hope is that the hard hat that people talk about in the safety market will be replaced with a higher-quality hat with the MIPS system within it.

Kaspi.kz

So Kaspi is a leading ecommerce platform in Kazakhstan. It operates in payments, it has an online marketplace, and it also has a fintech service. It's a bit like a combination of PayPal, Amazon, and an online bank. Well, we’ve seen companies like this operate in other markets, so we've got a lot of understanding of how you can connect different services together as an ecommerce platform. Growth is coming through the digitalisation of Kazakhstan. It’s a classic example of an emerging market that doesn't have a lot of the traditional infrastructure and is leapfrogging with mobile technology. Kazakhstan has about 19 million people, 14 million people use Kaspi's online marketplace. If we’re being very long-term as we like to be at Baillie Gifford, you know, they could go beyond Turkey and they could go broadly into that part of the world. It really is a huge, huge opportunity ahead.

Keyence

Keyence is a Japanese company. In many ways, it’s the eyes and ears of factory automation. Keyence provide products to make factories more efficient. They have things like laser scanners, measuring instruments, they have what they call 3D vision systems, and these things are constantly evolving, and Keyence is at the leading edge of this process. So we first invested in it at Baillie Gifford in 1998. We saw something special in the culture of the firm at that point. It’s grown significantly since then. So it’s moving into new industries, things like the pharmaceutical industry now is adopting a lot more automation. It’s operating in logistics, so we can trace products as they move around the world. So Keyence has played a big, big part in this. But it also gets stronger as it grows, because it's really more of a consulting service. Very profitable, because it doesn’t actually manufacture the products, it designs them, helps clients implement them. But as it gets more data, its services become stronger, its reputation increases, and it can add more value.

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