Strategic Report
1
represents a markedly asymmetric risk-reward profile,
whilst providing a dividend yield of circa 6%.
Semiconductor capital equipment companies, ASML, Lam
Research and KLA, struggled due to fears of the full impact
of an economic slowdown and potential industry
overcapacity. Whilst it is very difficult to accurately predict
the short term, we believe the fundamental drivers of
semiconductor demand are very clear: cloud computing,
artificial intelligence, 5G, the Internet of Things (“IoT”) and
the digitisation of the automotive industry. Each company
dominates its respective niche in the value chain and plays
a critical role in helping the wider industry both maximise
semiconductor production from finite resources and develop
and produce more advanced and energy efficient chips. We
still expect them all to have very bright futures and have been
pleased to see their management teams taking advantage
of the lower share prices by accelerating their respective
share buyback programs.
Shares in Microsoft fell significantly over the year, with the
company navigating a weak PC market and Cloud growth
expected to slow in 2023. Despite the negative share price
performance, we remain optimistic about the company’s
prospects. The group remains the key technology partner
for all enterprises and its software products are ubiquitous.
The company still expects to grow revenues at a double digit
rate in its 2023 financial year, driven by its Azure Cloud
business and Office 365, which now has approximately 350
million paying users. The management team is also seeking
to improve future profitability with workforce reductions of
10,000 employees (circa 5% of total). Longer term, CEO
Satya Nadella expects IT spending to increase from 5% to
10% of GDP over the current decade, which we believe will
enable the company to generate robust earnings growth
going forwards. Importantly, Microsoft aims to operate on
carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times, by 2030.
Furthermore, the company wants to be carbon negative in
the same timeframe and to have removed all carbon dioxide
it has emitted since its founding by 2050.
Alphabet remains the Company’s largest holding and was
the most significant detractor to investment performance.
We continue to believe the shares offer exceptional value
relative to the company’s core earnings power for a business
of such quality. In our view the shares fell during the year
primarily on weaker consumer discretionary spending, which
negatively affected both the company and the wider digital
advertising industry. Fundamentally, advertising remains a
cyclical industry and Google is now so large that it cannot
offset slower market growth through market share gains. We
believe that growth rates will reaccelerate once we exit this
economic slowdown. We also believe that the company has
significant scope to improve profitability, with headcount
more than doubling to circa 187,000 over the last five years
and an average employee salary significantly above peers.
In our view the recent decision to cut 12,000 jobs is the right
way forward, but more can and should be done.
We continue to believe that the ongoing growth of digital
advertising, successful scaling of the Google Cloud business
and improving capital allocation will continue to drive
significant earnings growth in the years ahead. Importantly,
Alphabet continues to work towards its sustainability targets.
The company has pledged to operate on carbon-free
energy everywhere, at all times, by 2030 and to replenish
120% of the water it consumes across its datacentres
andoffices.
After the year end, we opted to reduce our position in
Alphabet in February. Whilst we believe that Alphabet is well
positioned to counter the rising competition in Search,
following Microsoft's launch of its new Bing search engine,
we realise that the range of outcomes has widened. We
opted to realize some profit on our original position, thereby
resulting in a reduction in the overall investment position by
approximately one half.
We fully exited our position in Charter Communications in
April before the company reported its first quarter results,
with most of the sales executed at the start of that month.
We had thought that the company’s aggressively priced
bundled broadband and mobile product would help it to
continue to raise penetration across its footprint. Whilst this
may prove correct in time, the company is undeniably facing
increasing competition from new fibre rollouts and wireless
carriers have enjoyed notable early success in their fixed
wireless efforts. Consequently, we believed the range of
outcomes had widened and decided to pursue other
opportunities that we believed offered a better balance of
risk and reward. The shares declined by 27% from the date
of our exit to year end.
We chose to redeploy most of the proceeds by incrementally
adding to our holding in Canadian National Railway,
reopening a small position in US freight railroad, Union
Pacific, as mentioned above, and initiating a new position in
Amazon. In our view Amazon has effectively become an
essential utility, on which consumers and businesses are
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Menhaden Resource Efficiency PLC
Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 2022
Portfolio Manager’s Review
continued
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