Future Stocks: Our best ideas in China

Ben Buckler: China is the second largest economy in the world, and it’s the second largest stock market in the world. Automation, consumption, climate transition, digitisation, all of those are areas where Chinese companies are starting to dominate. And that’s our job, is to find those individual companies that lead in some of these critical trends.

Meituan

Meituan is a super app. It’s a super app that connects 400 million users daily. It’s mainly known for being a food delivery company. It’s really a food and a delivery company and has an excellent business in local services, so grocery, flights and travel too. So we’ve owned it since 2015 as a private company but it listed in 2018. And at that point, we already knew the founder, his vision. And as it focuses now on the future development, autonomous driving, autonomous delivery is really quite an important part of that. But it’s also going global. We’ve seen it go into Hong Kong, we’ve seen it go into the Middle East, and this year we’ll see it going into Latin America as well, helping connect users on a daily basis to merchants and services.

Midea

Midea is a global technology and manufacturing powerhouse. It’s one of the world’s leading home appliance manufacturers, as well as sort of heating, ventilation, air conditioning. This is the first company to have a fully automated 5G factory. That means they can turn out a washing machine every 15 seconds and do so with far lower labour costs and far lower inventory costs as well. At Baillie Gifford, we quite like the companies that invest in their research and development. And with a budget of about two billion US dollars a year, Midea are really at the forefront of that innovative development in smart homes, in industrial robots, in industrial automation. So this is really way more than a simple home appliance manufacturer. It really is a technology company for the era of the smart home.

CATL

CATL makes batteries that go into electric vehicles. They also make large sort of energy storage systems. CATL effectively are in one in every three new EV cars that are produced today: Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, and most people have never heard of them. CATL is a really good example of Baillie Gifford bringing together global perspectives from Edinburgh with local insights from being on the ground in Shanghai. They have a number of competitive advantages which partly come from scale, but that derives from being very strong in innovation. It’s also quite an important part of the global transition towards the green economy. We’re at the very early stages of this climate transition. CATL are right in the middle of that journey, helping companies electrify, whether it’s cars or whether it’s in their large-scale energy storage solutions, they are a provider of the future.

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