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As with any investment, your capital is at risk. Past performance is not a guide to future returns.   Qian Zhang (QZ): Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Qian Zhang. I’m an investment specialist in the emerging market clients team. I’m joined today by my colleague Roddy Snell and Ben Durrant, co-managers of our Asia ex Japan strategy. They have quite a lot to cover today. The plan is to first address the question about investing in Asia in the current macro environment, and then discuss the main themes in our portfolio. Ben and Roddy just came back from research trips in China and Vietnam, respectively. So it will be good to hear from them on their fresh takeaways. We will also discuss performance and outlook. We’re happy to receive your questions as we go. So please submit them using the Q&A button, and we will address them at the end. So let’s crack on. Roddy, can we start with you on your overall thinking of the asset class? A quick recap of last year, the impact from, obviously, the Gulf conflict more recently, and the implications for longer term. And I appreciate that is three questions in one. Roddy Snell (RS): Good morning to everyone. If you saw our webinars last year, you would have heard us discussing three key arguments supporting the case for Asia. Firstly, stronger macro resilience. Secondly, two of the strongest headwinds, the US dollar and extreme pessimism in China, have both been abating. And thirdly, very appealing valuations. Now last year, we saw all of these factors at play, and Asia delivered strong returns, more than 30 percent in dollars, outperforming the US market. And we also added good alpha on top of that with our barbell exposures in AI hardware and commodities both working well. Now, regarding Iran, so far, we don’t think the Middle East war has changed these arguments in the longer term. However, these are challenges that certainly warrant caution. De-escalation in a three-party conflict looks difficult and won’t be smooth. Oil shocks will certainly hurt some countries in the region more than others. And I would expect some notable pain to the consumer in some of the poorer oil-dependent parts of Asia, for example, ASEAN. And finally, the repercussions of the physical damage to key infrastructure are not yet fully understood. So that would be my broad summary for now. QZ: Right, so how is the portfolio positioned, and have you made any changes? RS: Sure, so the short answer is that we haven’t made any radical changes to the portfolio, but really some adjustments at the margin. We always believe that building portfolio resilience in advance is a more sensible way to protect returns than trying to predict or react to every geopolitical turn. Now, as things stand, I think the portfolio is relatively well positioned and has held up well against the index since the start of the conflict. Our biggest country underweight is India, which is the world’s third-largest oil consumer and importer. There’s been a longstanding portfolio construction decision because for some time we’ve really struggled to find attractive opportunities given valuations. The portfolio has also been overweight in the energy sector, which is a direct beneficiary of higher oil prices. And elsewhere, the impact of an oil shock is more nuanced. Oil-importing countries in Southeast Asia are clearly more vulnerable. I came back from Vietnam, as you mentioned, a bit more cautious. The longer-term structural argument very much remains, but as an energy-importing frontier market driven by retail investors, the impact of an oil shock may weigh on Vietnamese markets disproportionately. So we’ve trimmed our exposure there to less than five percent. On the other hand, China holds large reserves and has a greater mix of alternative energy sources than any other major economy. It’s got the world’s largest solar and battery capacity and a deep supply chain in the new energy sector. So will it be one of the longer-term winners from this disruption? I think that is very plausible. And today, China is one of our largest overweight countries. Finally, in terms of companies, what we’ve been doing is trying to look through the conflict and seeing where likely winners are. Green energy looks like one, and we topped up our position in CATL, the world’s leading battery and energy storage producer, and also purchased Sungrow, a solar converter company. We also purchased Samsung E&A, a Korean energy and engineering business, on the basis that countries worldwide will be spending significantly more on energy resilience. We also added to CNOOC, a direct oil and gas play. So overall, we feel the portfolio is positioned in the right way. Overweighting China and underweighting India, more modest Vietnam exposure and increased our allocations to energy and new-energy-related names. QZ: Thank you. That’s quite clear. Let’s stay with China for a moment, if I may come to you, Ben. You just came back from a China trip. Who did you meet, and what are your key takeaways? Ben Durrant (BD): Sure. Well, the high-level takeaway is that China is always worth visiting from a research perspective. A lot of our advantage actually comes from being away from the noise, but China is maybe the exception to that, because the pace of change is so fast, nuance so important, and the disconnect between the Western perspective and the on-the-ground reality is huge. So this was my fifth trip to China over the past two years. It helps to bring to life the good work our Shanghai colleagues are doing. And their connections and our firm’s reputation as long-term investors there gives us excellent access to founders, both public and private. So we met some of the leading companies at the cutting edge of AI and some new industries where China is making inroads globally, such as healthcare or even luxury brands, as well as checking in on some of our existing portfolio holdings. Three observations maybe. So firstly, surprisingly perhaps, China offers stability from an equity markets perspective nowadays. Despite everything in the world, most businesses there are getting on just fine with most of that revenue domestic, and exporters are still winning market share globally. The second would be on AI. The AI conversations we had there felt robust and globally relevant. We met ByteDance and also all three founders of the leading independent frontier labs in China. We own one of them here, MiniMax, which listed in January, and we purchased the shares at IPO then. The shares are up fivefold since that point. We’ve taken some profit, but it’s still remarkable what has been achieved. And actually, valuations in absolute terms relative to the US companies look very cheap there. And these companies have been forced to be efficient because of US efforts to restrict them by restricting access to the chips to train and run their models. But the ironic consequence of this is that these models now offer leading-edge capability at bargain prices, only one-tenth of Anthropic’s, for example, because they’ve been forced to be much more careful with their resource, unlike OpenAI, for example. So this has made them more ferocious competitors than they might otherwise have been. And then one of the key features of our conversations there was agentic AI, which they’ve been seeing increasing demand tenfold, one hundredfold. So they are very well placed to be maybe the mass-market producer of AI capability for the world, something which I still feel is underappreciated. The third point would be going to the real economy in China, the consumer side of things, which is still relatively weak, but more likely, I think, to improve from here than get worse. If you go back to a trip a year ago, people were just holding all their money in cash if they could, which is why you’ve got $20tn-plus of excess savings still sitting there in bank accounts. And from a portfolio perspective, we hold some steady compounders exposed to this. And they haven’t been going great guns as a result of that consumer weakness. But we’re still focusing on companies that have the upper hand when that consumption comes back and also in changing patterns of spending, like Luckin Coffee, for example. And importantly, this year, 2026, is maybe the first where net wealth creation will be positive, i.e. stock market gains and increasing GDP growth and income growth will more than offset any weakness in property equity values. And so that could spark a positive feedback loop, more spending, consumers do better, do benefit from that. And then a lot of that $20tn comes off the sidelines, which could be really quite exciting, both for consumer stocks and revenue as well. QZ: Well, that’s interesting, since you talk about consumer and also Luckin Coffee. Did you order any cheap milk tea from any of those platforms when they offer quite substantial subsidies? BD: A few, though. I think my Shanghai colleagues are slightly addicted to great-quality coffee, which you can get delivered to the office door for the equivalent of 30p, so I can see why. The background here, though, is that these ultra-cheap delivery prices are a result of a huge price war in instant commerce, with Meituan, the long-time leader there in food delivery and broader SME delivery, and competing now with JD.com and Alibaba, all of whom are subsidising food and drink delivery as a way to build out that base delivery network for getting literally anything else delivered that you want within a few minutes, maybe the future of e-commerce there. This ranges from anything in their own warehouses or any local store, be it clothes, electronics or even, as I think I’ve got a photo here, a huge bouquet of flowers, as you can see. So you can get whatever you want at very good prices. The problem, though, is this is intense competition today for what is maybe a distant future prize, which has hurt margins in our holding Meituan, which has in turn unsurprisingly impacted the share price. We met the founder Wang Xing in Beijing to discuss this. It’s harder competition, maybe, than they’ve seen in the past, because the eventual prize is also bigger. It’s the future of all consumer spending, really. This isn’t the first time they faced competition. They’ve always won thus far. So we’re still minded at the moment to see this battle as a size, as evidence of the potential reward for this business. But it is certainly something to be cautionary about. So in some ways, from my perspective, the challenging environment for these consumer businesses and Meituan is reassuring in a way when we look at the China portfolio, because as Roddy mentioned, that barbell of some of the AI hardware and also materials, a lot of which is in China, both have worked. But while China’s our largest overweight, you can split that into three parts. Firstly, that new technology exposure, most of which has done well. Tencent at the large end, then companies like MiniMax or Montage Technologies at the smaller side of things. And then that substantial part in materials, because the Chinese operators here are competitively advantaged in a global industry. And so those China materials holdings are now approaching 10 percent of the overall portfolio. But then finally, that China consumer-oriented perspective, where here we’re seeing companies and management teams as good or better than they were when we first invested, but cheaper, and they haven’t worked yet. So it shows that they’re moving on a different cycle to the rest of the China portfolio, which I think brings diversification and something to be excited about in future, despite much of the rest of the portfolio still doing well at the moment. QZ: Right, thank you. That’s a quite good overview of different segments of exposures that we have in China. And with that, let’s move on to the two biggest themes that we have in the portfolio, AI hardware and materials, as we mentioned at the barbell at the beginning. Both of these two sides have done well for the portfolio in the past, say, 12 to 18 months. And allocation to the materials sector is now a bit more than 10 percent of the portfolio. And Roddy, can I come to you, elaborate a little bit more on this segment? What’s next? RS: Sure. Well, we built up our exposure to key metals, particularly copper, several years ago. And earlier last year, we added to some gold mines. And both have done well. We think the case for copper remains very strong. The IEA, for example, estimates that in the next five years, supply is going to fall about 25 percent short of demand. And this really reflects more than a decade of underinvestment and increasing complexity of building and operating mines, neither of which can be resolved quickly. Then on the demand side, copper demand is becoming really less of a pure GDP construction proxy and more of a multi-electrification story. Energy transition, grid upgrades and, more recently, the AI build-out. A data centre without power is just a very expensive warehouse. So in that context, materials aren’t just peripheral, but they’re really starting to look absolutely essential. Now, company-wise, we’ve got two holdings or key holdings in copper, Zijin Mining and MMG in China. MMG is the more leveraged, pure play of copper. Its core asset is the Las Bambas mine in Peru. And the share price did very well in the last 12 months. So we’ve actually been reducing the position in MMG to lock in some profits. But we have reallocated some of that into two other Chinese names, CMOC Group and Zangge Mining, which are larger and more diversified. And finally, look, I’ll just highlight the miners we hold are all expanding their production significantly. So the case is both price and volumes. So overall, look, key materials remain a significant theme that we are invested in for the portfolio. QZ: All right, thanks for that. How about the other side of the barbell, i.e. AI-hardware-related? BD: Yeah, I’ll take that, shall I? So we’re deliberately invested and still very positive here. I know it’s fashionable to highlight all the risks of it being a bubble, but we really do see the product-market fit as real, and the supply-demand picture as incredibly compelling, in that demand for AI is limited really only by the imagination of the user, and spending is tiny relative to the potential still. By contrast, supply here, the warehouses, the data centres Roddy’s talking about there, is a real-world challenge of building out ever more multi-$bn factories to make those logic, memory and advanced networking components. So this mismatch between the ideas world and the real world is so hard to fix. We can each increase our demand for AI tenfold in a day, but TSMC, Hynix and Samsung cannot increase capacity like that for years. So we think that AI hardware demand growth is real, and there are huge bottlenecks, mostly centred in North Asia. And the change of understanding of a company like SK Hynix, or its even cheaper parent, SK Square, where we have most of our holdings, that change takes time. Historically, these are seen as a cyclical commodity producer, but now they’re a key long-term supplier with prepaid contracts from some of the leading customers in the world. There’s still evident belief in the share price. Because if you look at the chart, despite it going practically vertical, it’s still at valuations of under four times earnings. And we see most of those earnings locked in over the next two years. That all said, we do recognise plenty of the risks. And from our perspective, though, the key one is that some parts of that AI hardware supply chain will fix bottlenecks quicker than others. You don’t want to be left owning the hot AI stock that is suddenly in an oversupplied commodity component manufacturer again, even though it is growing. It’s growing faster than the rest of the market there, which is not good for it. So our investment debates really centre more around that kind of question. And naturally, we think we own the companies here where the bottlenecks are most enduring, where their competitive positions are unique. There are risks and opportunities on the other side of the AI coin too. Hardware has done well for the portfolio, and we’re looking at where software or knowledge companies can benefit or have been indiscriminately sold off. We like plenty of our current holdings as beneficiaries, be it Tencent or Sea Limited, for example, but we also see opportunities and potential new buys here too. If you look at US-listed foreign software and platform businesses, plenty of those have been indiscriminately sold off, and so we’re considering where the winners have been inadvertently discarded there. So overall, AI remains a theme in which we’re invested, but we’ve been recycling some of that outperformance into other more idiosyncratic opportunities within and outwith AI. QZ: All right, thank you. Thanks for the updates in the portfolio about the key themes of the barbell, China, energy and energy-related, resilience under the current environment, etc. I would like to come back to the asset class itself. I know the team is pondering the second-order impact from the Gulf conflict and the likely longer-term impact for Asia. If oil price stays higher for longer, what would be the longer-term impact for Asia? And can I come back to you on this, Roddy? RS: Absolutely. So if the conflict in the Gulf remains relatively short-lived, we remain largely comfortable with the growth bias in our portfolio. However, we are, as you mentioned, giving some thought to the repercussions of a more protracted conflict. So if oil prices stay high for an extended period, the largest oil importer in the region may well feel more pain. So an underweight India continues to make sense to us. The good news is that most Asian countries have adopted orthodox macro policies for years, and they have some buffer to counterbalance the shock if it’s needed. The other important factor we haven’t discussed is obviously the dollar. Are we heading towards a stronger dollar environment, potentially higher inflation and higher rates? The dollar continues to be seen as the flight-to-safety currency for the time being. But so far, the dollar movement has been far less than in previous crises. And we think that many of the arguments for a weaker dollar remain structural, i.e. persistently high budget deficits in the US. Over half of intra-BRICS transactions are now settled in Chinese RMB. Central banks are systematically reducing USD reserves, etc. Also, our risk teams have stressed the portfolio across various scenarios, and we understand where the vulnerabilities may arise. For example, high interest rates are seldom helpful for long-duration growth stocks where the cash flows come years later. However, if you look at the portfolio, it does have higher earnings growth and better earnings quality than the index, suggesting stocks held in the portfolio have genuine pricing power, partially offsetting duration vulnerability. In addition, in aggregate, the portfolio is net cash, i.e. our companies that we hold are debt-free, suggesting some protection to higher interest rates. It’s also worth noting that despite the growth premium, the portfolio’s PE is actually lower than the index. So we’re not overpaying at all for the growth that we have in the portfolio. And lastly, look, regardless of duration and the severity of the Gulf conflict, a couple of things seem highly likely. We’ve touched them already, but energy security is likely to become ever more critical for nations worldwide. Second, there’s likely to be significant construction activity globally as countries conclude that national security matters more than just supply chain and comparative advantages. And this shift could lead to greater investment in alternative hydrocarbon supplies, renewable energy, infrastructure build-outs, etc. And many Asian companies can play an important role in these areas. And then finally, look, while we have arguably little insight into the likely direction or duration of the war, we are carefully assessing the probability of a recession and the risks that it poses to our non-energy cyclical exposures. In theory, there should be an offset from our secular growers in a world of rising AI capabilities and falling marginal costs that Ben touched on. A growing risk of recession also raises the likelihood of de-escalation policy support while underpinning the technology and energy self-sufficiency themes that we are exposed to. And then last but not least, I think it is helpful to understand the background. Asia’s performance has lagged global for more than a decade. And despite the strength last year, the valuation discount remains very wide. And we know from history, when relative performance does turn, it tends to run for multiple years. QZ: So would you say you’re still positive on the asset class for the medium to long term and rationales behind that? RS: Yes, absolutely. And I think the world is becoming more fragmented, more resource-constrained and more compute-intensive. And that should favour several parts of Asia more than investors currently appreciate. Indeed, I’d say our view is that expectations for Asian equities really remain quite anchored to an old narrative that bundles highly diverse sets of businesses into a single uniform block and then dismisses it all as overly cyclical or risky as an asset class. Yet in reality, it’s a much broader range of Asian companies across the region that are really quietly building strong businesses, deeply embedded in global secular trends. And so we think allocations to Asia will become less of a global macro call driven by risk-on, risk-off sentiment and increasingly driven by genuine world-class companies in the region. So this is a big year for me. It’s coming up to 20 years at Baillie Gifford and investing in Asia. I’d say this is absolutely one of the most attractive periods, I think, to be investing in Asia. I think a big inflection point is coming. And Asia is likely to be one, if not the best-performing markets over the coming years. QZ: Yeah, well, thanks for that. That’s, of course, what we always say, that having enough and having proper exposure to Asia is one of the many important decisions that many of us will make in the investment community. We’ll stop here in terms of the questions that we prepared, but we received quite a lot from our live audience, and let’s quickly go through them. The first one is quite a relevant one. In particular, thinking about the themes that we have in the portfolio, people historically thinking about Asia as a potential diversification from their core allocation to developed market, but given the significant share of the common investment themes, particularly across AI. Is that the mirroring of positioning patterns that we see in the developed markets? And how do we think about from a diversification perspective on asset allocation if we have similar themes across Asia and developed market? RS: Sure. The question is, are our themes actually very similar to global markets? Yeah, I think that’s a broadly correct summary of some of the areas where we invest in Asia. Arguably, areas like AI, the key driver has been, for example, the hyperscaler build-out in the US. I suppose the key point we would say is that we are looking at the key critical bottlenecks in Asia, whereas the returns in the US are yet to come through for many of these large players, they are already there for the companies we are investing in, the likes of Hynix, Samsung, TSMC. They are making record returns on capital invested and record levels of profitability. So by finding those critical bottlenecks that exist primarily in Asia, we’re actually already reaping the financial rewards, the free cash flow is coming. So I think there’s quite a different economic dynamic to some of the businesses we’re investing in. And then secondly, I’d say that there are parts that are really quite uncorrelated to the rest of the world. I think China’s the perfect example of that. That tends to be, particularly the local A-share market, have little correlation to global markets and is probably one of the best diversifiers that you can have in a global portfolio. And of course, China, including the A-share market, is about 40 percent of our portfolio. So I think there are large parts that are outwith global correlations. QZ: Right. Thank you. The next couple of questions are probably bundle them together. It’s more about different country positions in our portfolio. So how are you positioned in Taiwan and Korea? Is it mainly technology? And especially in Korea, how about the cheaper governance improvement companies? RS: Sure, yeah. So I’ll take Korea and Taiwan. I suppose the big positions are in technology. So in Taiwan, it would be one of our biggest underweight positions. And that’s essentially because we have nothing in domestic-focused Taiwan. It is all in the exporters, in the technology spaces, so the likes of TSMC or other businesses like MediaTek involved in the semiconductor or hardware supply chain. So big underweight in Taiwan, but that is because we don’t invest in any of the local domestic businesses. They just didn’t have the growth that we’re looking for. Korea, one of our larger positions, and again that is all focused very much on the export technology side predominantly, very little, in fact nothing really on the domestic story in Korea. As I say, most of that has been invested in the large semiconductor names, so Samsung and Hynix, and also a company called SK Square, which is a holding company for Hynix, would be the main positions. More recently, we have invested in some of the engineering and construction businesses in Korea. So I mentioned Samsung E&C, but also Samsung C&T. So that’s a broader theme into global capex spend, broadening out, and the Koreans being advantaged there. QZ: All right, thank you. Next question’s about, maybe I come to you, Ben, on this, since we discussed about it at the desk yesterday. ASEAN markets and Singapore, so ASEAN looks much cheaper and a bit out of favour. How about the likes of Philippines, Indonesia, and then Singaporean market reforms seem to be working with some momentum? Have they looked there, and do they have any positioning there at all? BD: Yeah, sure. So, naturally, we’re looking. In ASEAN, we agree, broadly speaking, out of favour. One of the things I would say is that more recently, to Roddy’s earlier points, its energy dependence leaves it relatively vulnerable. If you see an increase in global growth uncertainty, I think some of the North Asian winners continue to do very strongly. AI is separate or almost non-discretionary now in that context, whereas ASEAN is more vulnerable. Within ASEAN, we prefer Vietnam. They are far stronger from an export perspective and actually politically more stable than the likes of Indonesia or the Philippines. Singapore itself, there’s plenty of high-quality companies that we admire, the banks, for example, but they largely have been plays on macro interest rates. And this market reform you’ve seen in Singapore has been beneficial, but broadly in increasing liquidity in some of the much smaller-cap businesses there. So when we look for that inherent long-term uncertainty, the favourable skew, the kind of things other people find difficult to own or the chance for exceptional high growth, we tend to steer from a country perspective towards Vietnam and from a stock perspective towards businesses like Sea Limited or Grab, both of which have Southeast Asian exposure. We do have some exposure to the Indonesian banks which offer very attractive rupiah dividend yields, and if you see improvements in Indonesia, they’ll be real beneficiaries. But for the moment we’ve decided not to go further down that curve or deeper into ASEAN, which has frankly been a correct decision over the last couple of years. QZ: Right. Cool, thank you. The next question, I think, is a very good one about market cap. So it seems like the question is, you seem to focus on mega-cap Asian names, but there’s a lot of value and performance have been in the smaller names. Are you missing this opportunity by sticking to larger caps? And especially some of the larger-cap names, such as Meituan, we mentioned, and also Sea Limited, we mentioned, have been short-term performance detractors. So what’s your take on this? RS: I’m happy to take that. Look, as long as the company is roughly over $1bn, we are agnostic to the market cap. We’ll invest simply where we’re finding the best stock ideas. And if you go back five or six years, we were underweight, I’d say, the mega-cap names. We had very little in the likes of Alibaba, Tencent, smallish positions in TSMC, Samsung, relative to today. But today, we do have big positions in a number of the largest companies in Asia. Our biggest positions would be TSMC, Samsung, Hynix and Tencent. And that’s because we think they are just great businesses at the moment. We’re at a point where scale is a huge capital advantage in, say, platform companies where user base and user bases and ecosystems matter. And in semiconductors, the scale of your fabs and your balance sheet to fund those is absolutely critical. So we’re at a point in time where scale in key industries is one of the most important factors you can get. And that has led us to be investing in big positions in some of those much larger mega-cap names. So those names would be nearly 30 percent-plus of our portfolio. If the situation changes and there are better opportunities elsewhere, we’d happily sell them down and go into some of the smaller-cap names. Secondly, I would also say we do have a reasonably large number of mid-cap names, and we’ve done very well, particularly in our Taiwanese mid-cap holdings, between $2bn and $5bn. So there is a large portion of the detail in that small- to mid-cap range, or mid-cap range, which we also look at and have performed very strongly over the past 12 to 18 months. QZ: Yeah, I would probably add that, yes, we do have quite a few number of holdings in a very large cap. But if you look at the portfolio’s allocation to market cap that’s below $10bn, it is mostly double the weights that are in the index. So we do have quite a bit of exposure in the small- and mid-cap range as well. Historically, they have been very good contributors to relative performance as well. We’ve covered most of the questions that we received, and hopefully this was a good summary in terms of how we see the macro environment, how we are positioning the portfolio, what have been the recent changes and how we see the future going in terms of the asset class and investing in Asia. Thank you very much for your continued support to our portfolio, to our strategy. And we wish you a good spring and upcoming summer. And see you next time in our next webinar. Thank you very much. Thank you, Roddy and Ben.   Annual past performance to 31 March each year <table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; border-width: 0px; height: 74px;"> <tbody> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.8261%;"> </td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5221%;">2022</td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.2605%;">2023</td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.1304%;">2024</td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.6522%;">2025</td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5217%;">2026</td> </tr> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.8261%;">Asia ex Japan Composite (net%)</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5221%;">-11.0</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.2605%;">-15.0</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.1304%;">11.3</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.6522%;">1.7</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5217%;">37.3</td> </tr> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.8261%;">Asia ex Japan Composite (gross %) </td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5221%;">-10.4</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.2605%;">-14.4</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.1304%;">12.1</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.6522%;">2.4</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5217%;">38.2</td> </tr> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.8261%;">MSCI AC Asia ex Japan </td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5221%;">-14.4</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.2605%;">-8.5</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.1304%;">4.4</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.6522%;">11.9</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 12.5217%;">29.1</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>   Annualised returns to 31 March 2025 <table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.9566%; border-width: 0px; height: 74px;"> <tbody> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.9735%;"> </td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.8775%;">1 year</td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.6193%;">5 years</td> <td style="border-width: 1px 1px 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(204, 204, 204) rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: initial; padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.4874%;">10 years</td> </tr> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.9735%;">Asia ex Japan Composite (net%)</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.8775%;">37.3</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.6193%;">3.3</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.4874%;">13.1</td> </tr> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.9735%;">Asia ex Japan Composite (gross %) </td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.8775%;">38.2</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.6193%;">4.0</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.4874%;">13.9</td> </tr> <tr style="height: 18.5px;"> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 37.9735%;">MSCI AC Asia ex Japan </td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.8775%;">29.1</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.6193%;">3.4</td> <td style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 10px; height: 18.5px; width: 20.4874%;">8.6</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Source: Revolution, MSCI. 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Asia’s next act

Overview

About the speakers

About the speakers

Ben Durrant

Roddy Snell

Related funds

Pacific Fund

Worldwide Asia Ex Japan Fund

Related investment strategies

Asia ex Japan | Investment Strategy