LTGG Reflections: Listening beats forecasting

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We believe the best insights don’t always emerge from screens or income statements, but from conversations — unscripted, open-ended and face-to-face. That’s why the Long Term Global Growth team prioritises getting out into the world: to walk the warehouse floors, meet the people behind the numbers and challenge our assumptions at the source.

This past month, the team has held 31 face-to-face company meetings, including trips to the USA, Sweden and France. We met founder-CEOs, logistics managers and newly appointed CTOs, to name a few. Some confirmed our hypotheses. Others surprised us. But all reminded us that staying imaginative about how the world might change means first staying curious — and always, deeply, listening.

In what follows, we share a few highlights from those conversations — and the ideas they sparked.

Spotify has become a household name, with nearly 700 million monthly users across 184 countries. 2024 also marked a point of inflexion, as the company booked its first-ever annual profit — a milestone the market rewarded with a doubling in the share price. It was, therefore, as important as ever to assess whether there is still meaningful upside ahead.

To explore this, we travelled to Sweden to hear directly from Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and CEO. What we got wasn’t a forecast — it was a mindset.

The ambition is bold: one billion paying users plus another 500 million on the ad-supported tier. But Ek was frank about the tension between monetising through ads and growing subscribers. Right now, the focus is firmly on the latter. However, growth, especially in emerging markets, will hinge on household income levels rising — a macroeconomic factor entirely out of Spotify’s hands. What is in their control is disciplined execution, only investing where returns are real.

What stood out most, however, was Ek’s belief that AI is not just an enabler, but a force of reinvention. He envisions a future where hyper-efficient, hyper-profitable software companies — potentially run by a handful of people — become the norm. This is having a tangible effect on how the business is run. We have observed a radical change during our seven years of ownership; gone are the days of throwing headcount at every challenge. Now, it's about asking: how few people does this really need?

We’ve underestimated Spotify before, and this meeting pushed us to reassess once more. We still see it as a worthy constituent in a portfolio of outliers, not because of the numbers alone but because of the imagination and discipline behind them.

As one of the newer additions to the portfolio, we’re still getting to know Symbotic, which made the breadth of access we had in recent weeks all the more valuable. From the founder and outgoing CFO to the new CTO and a warehouse floor supervisor, we heard a range of perspectives that reaffirmed our belief that the clearest signals often come from what people are quietly fixing, not loudly forecasting.

Symbotic is a robotics company transforming warehouse logistics for giants like Walmart, and in doing so, helping to rewire the physical infrastructure of retail. During our tour of a distribution centre outside Boston, the technology was undeniably impressive. But it was a throwaway comment that spoke volumes: in the manual half of the facility, attrition hits 70 per cent. On the automated side? Only one person has left in two years. It was a striking reminder that automation, done right, can improve work as well as efficiency.

Symbotic’s $20bn backlog reflects a strong product-market fit, but it was our conversation with newly appointed CTO James Kuffner that sharpened our conviction on the company’s trajectory. In his first three months, he’s already improved robot efficiency by 25 per cent and cut warehouse simulation times from a week to just two hours. His background at Waymo and Toyota is being put to immediate use, not only in technology but in mindset, introducing a Kaizen-like discipline into the product and engineering process.

That said, our enthusiasm remains tempered by some concerns. The sudden departure of the CFO — after only 18 months and just as the company was rebuilding trust after a financial restatement — raised questions. And while founder-CEO Rick Cohen remains highly engaged at 72 (he still chairs daily 7:30am management calls), there’s no clear succession plan in place.

Still, the long-term opportunity is expanding. A recent deal to acquire Walmart’s internal robotics unit opens up new possibilities in back-of-store automation and, potentially, micro-fulfilment. While early traction in sectors like healthcare and even defence logistics suggests broader applications.

This visit reinforced why we prioritise being in the room — and on the floor. For a company still building its narrative in public markets, seeing how the culture, leadership and frontline operations connect was more revealing than any quarterly report could ever be.

While we certainly enjoy the opportunity to see companies on their home turf, we are very fortunate to have several visitors to our Edinburgh offices. This month, we welcomed Marcos Galperin, the founder and CEO of MercadoLibre — Latin America’s leading e-commerce and fintech platform — just two weeks after announcing his transition to Executive Chair.

As one of the region’s most successful entrepreneurs, Galperin has built a business with the scale of Amazon and the agility of a start-up. His successor, Ariel “Ari” Szarfsztejn, currently Head of Commerce, will take over as CEO in January 2026. When we asked, “Why now?” Galperin didn’t default to talking points. Instead, he gave us a glimpse of what it means to lead with intent — a desire to step aside while the business is strong, to keep the team sharp, and to protect top talent from being poached with Silicon Valley-sized offers. "This is not the time to relax, but to double down," he said.

Echoing what we heard from Ek, Galperin also sees AI as a generational shift, not an incremental upgrade. Rather than build a standalone team, his ask is that everyone experiments. We were particularly struck by a story from early in MeLi’s journey, when a taxi driver complained about the user interface. Galperin, shaken by how out of touch he’d become, moved his desk, not to finance or operations, but to sit beside the CTO… for three years! It changed the way MeLi builds software. That spirit of proximity and humility, of learning directly from those closest to the problem, still runs deep in the company today. Galperin reassured us that Szarfsztejn shares this mindset and has been instrumental in the development of software for the logistics side of the business. 

The transition here appears to have been thoughtfully planned out. There is no shortage of growth runway for MeLi, and AI offers huge potential to accelerate the product offering while lowering costs. We believe it is certainly worthy of being a top 10 holding in Long-Term Global Growth portfolios. 

Next month, our journey continues in China, where we’ll meet portfolio holdings and explore new ideas that may shape the next decade of growth. As ever, our goal won’t be to confirm models or extrapolate margins — it will be to listen to founders and engineers, newly appointed leaders, and long-tenured operators. In LTGG, we believe our future success hinges on remaining open-minded about the sources of future returns, and there is no substitute for hearing firsthand from the individuals creating and shaping the future. 

RISK FACTORS

This content contains information on investments which does not constitute independent research. Accordingly, it is not subject to the protections afforded to independent research and Baillie Gifford and its staff may have dealt in the investments concerned.

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The most significant risks of an investment in the Baillie Gifford Long Term Global Growth Fund are: Investment Style Risk, Growth Stock Risk, Long-Term Investment Strategy Risk, Non-Diversification Risk and Non-U.S. Investment Risk. The Fund is managed on a bottom up basis and stock selection is likely to be the main driver of investment returns. Returns are unlikely to track the movements of the benchmark. The prices of growth stocks can be based largely on expectations of future earnings and can decline significantly in reaction to negative news. The Fund is managed on a long-term outlook, meaning that the Fund managers look for investments that they think will make returns over a number of years, rather than over shorter time periods. The Fund may have a smaller number of holdings with larger positions in each relative to other mutual funds. Non-U.S. securities are subject to additional risks, including less liquidity, increased volatility, less transparency, withholding or other taxes and increased vulnerability to adverse changes in local and global economic conditions. There can be less regulation and possible fluctuation in value due to adverse political conditions. Other Fund risks include: Asia Risk, China Risk, Conflicts of Interest Risk, Currency Risk, Developed Markets Risk, Emerging Markets Risk, Equity Securities Risk, Environmental, Social and Governance Risk, Focused Investment Risk, Government and Regulatory Risk, Information Technology Risk, Initial Public Offering Risk, Large-Capitalization Securities Risk, Liquidity Risk, Market Disruption and Geopolitical Risk, Market Risk, Service Provider Risk, Settlement Risk, Small-and Medium-Capitalization Securities Risk, and Valuation Risk.

For more information about these and other risks of an investment in the fund, see “Principal Investment Risks” and “Additional Investment Strategies” in the prospectus. The Baillie Gifford Long Term Global Growth Fund seeks to provide long-term capital appreciation. There can be no assurance, however, that the fund will achieve its investment objective.

The fund is distributed by Baillie Gifford Funds Services LLC. Baillie Gifford Funds Services LLC is registered as a broker-dealer with the SEC, a member of FINRA and is an affiliate of Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited.

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