2020: Seeking visibility amid uncertainty
Making up for lost ground
The Covid-19 crisis has provided unique challenges for investment managers as they attempt to grapple with a crisis unprecedented in nature, depth and speed.
The difficulty is compounded by the fact the companies themselves have very little visibility.
Peter Winnick, CEO of ASML, the leading supplier to the semiconductor industry, said predicting the future is challenging and that the firm is "certainly not adding opinions". "We continue to look at the facts, day by day and act accordingly," he added.
As portfolio managers we must also attempt to build what visibility we can around the facts. Forecasting 2020 accurately is a near impossible task, but that is not to say we are completely in the dark.
For some companies, the nature of the products they sell mean they are likely to be well protected, be that food in the case of the grocery retailer Jeronimo Martins or pharmaceutical drugs in the case of Roche.
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Some may even benefit from the crisis: demand for Ambu's intensive care unit respiratory devices has led them to raise their corporate guidance already this year.
For others less fortunate, it is their conservative balance sheets, for so long criticised by investors, that may prove critical.
Ryanair's €4bn of balance sheet cash should be enough to see them through even an extended period of grounding, just as Zara and Bershka parent company Inditex's €8bn net cash position should protect them against store closures.
This is also a time when the virtues of recurring revenue models come to the fore. Just consider how many of us have continued to pay our Microsoft or Bloomberg subscriptions, even during the lockdown.
For SAP, this meant they were able to generate revenue growth during the lockdown quarter (Q2), despite a decline in new license sales.
Defensiveness is for us a key quality of quality, and 2020 is testing this in a manner not seen in our 30-year history. The fact only three companies in our portfolio have cancelled their dividend suggests the majority of the companies are faring well on this measure.
Surviving the crisis in one thing, but equally important is whether companies' end markets will have changed as they come out the other side.
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One way to think of it is to divide companies into three buckets: those for whom there should be no change, those for whom there could be some change and those whose end markets could be significantly impacted.
The first bucket largely constitutes healthcare companies, for obvious reasons: people will still need life-saving drugs, hearing aids, glasses and nursing homes.
But not in isolation. One can think of Adyen, the online payment processor, who will continue to benefit from the structural shift of spending online, a dynamic that could even accelerate as a result of the crisis. This bucket constitutes in our opinion roughly two-thirds of the portfolio.
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