How stewardship can bring perspective amid uncertainty

Investors today are navigating a new economic era, with heightened geopolitical tensions and growing policy divergence. While the inherent unpredictability of this still-evolving new era may be unsettling, we believe it creates opportunities for active investors who can identify companies that are better prepared for this more volatile backdrop. Here, we explore a framework centred on recognising the inherent qualities of good corporate stewardship. The framework seeks to identify strong leaders that drive attractive returns for shareholders over the long run while considering the interests of all other stakeholders. By holding a high bar and consistently applying this framework to create a portfolio of leading stewards, investors can tilt the odds in favour of attractive and recurring returns over the long run that align well with a core equity allocation.

A volatile macro backdrop

After more than two decades marked by coordinated policy action and globalisation, we have reverted to an era of shorter and more volatile cycles with pronounced divergences between economies and policy regimes. The picture is further complicated by the advent of AI and an increasingly complex geopolitical environment. Given the structural nature of these shifts, we believe this unpredictable backdrop is here to stay and investors need to adapt accordingly. And in our view, this new world should favour active investors over the longer run. Separating meaningful trends and their impact on fundamentals from the noise has undoubtedly become harder, but this hurdle can be overcome by having a disciplined philosophy and process for investing, backed by proactive research and engagement.

The power of stewardship investing

For longer-term-orientated investors, we think assessing businesses through a stewardship lens can help to identify companies with the potential to produce strong financial returns over an extended period. In our experience, the typical qualities of a business demonstrating superior corporate stewardship include:

• A robust governance structure that helps it to allocate capital more efficiently for the long run and, in doing so, bolster its competitive advantage and pricing power;
• The ability to balance the interests of stakeholders— be it employees, customers, suppliers or the communities in which it operates — which reduces friction on returns by contributing to a more engaged and loyal workforce, greater customer satisfaction and more sustainable supply chains; and 
• A focus on addressing the environmental impact of its operations, which, over time, can strengthen the resilience of its business and its long-term return potential.

A robust stock selection process, which prioritises companies with high financial returns and the stewardship to sustain them, together with a risk-aware approach to portfolio construction, can help to build a portfolio to navigate macroeconomic volatility over the long term. To date, our experience suggests that allocations to stewardship leaders have tended to result in a diversified core equity portfolio that is generally less volatile than the broader market. Whether this will still hold true in an environment of shorter cycles and structural change may, to a significant extent, depend on the ability to capitalise proactively on research and engagement insights.

Generating returns through research and engagement 

In practice, this focus on stewardship investing means delving deeper into the leadership and decision making around those aspects of a company’s value creation potential that are most vulnerable to the impact of sudden reversals. In our opinion, three key areas in particular demand greater attention:

1. The impact of growing capital intensity

While AI is still in its early stages, those companies seen to be connected to the build-out of AI infrastructure enjoyed exceptional share price performance in 2024. While we are at the beginning of a new and promising technology, there are still many unknowns, including the longer-term return on the wave of capital being invested. While there is plenty to be excited about, we believe it is important to set guardrails and invest thoughtfully alongside this large and unconstrained capex cycle. Stewardship criteria can help screen for greater capital discipline, oversight and foresight around longer-term returns, and important additional considerations including access to resources and talent. Engagement can also help assess strategic focus and strength of execution. These considerations can help inform security selection in today’s highly concentrated market.

Figure 1

As Figure 1 illustrates, capital is not a scarce resource for these technology businesses. Meanwhile, the existential threat of missing out on the next innovation cycle will keep technology companies spending, even if the payoffs are uncertain. Capital is cheap and abundant, as capital providers look to benefit from the success of innovation. Yet many technology companies have ownership and governance structures that provide limited or no recourse to shareholders or other providers of capital to ensure some eventual discipline. Unconstrained capital spending is now transforming the larger technology providers into much more capital-intensive businesses, away from the high-growth/low-capex model of the past. This new model presents new risks to the durability of financial returns. Our work has helped us identify less capital-intensive models with strong leadership, board oversight and equal voting and economic rights that allow us to gain exposure to AI infrastructure trends without taking on additional oversight risks.

2. Leadership through volatile times

For us, the experience and foresight that boards bring are essential to long-term share price performance. The responsibilities of a board are broad: identifying and supporting leaders, fostering a rich and deep talent bench, pivoting when a business faces new strategic challenges, providing stewardship oversight of capital allocation decisions and helping balance stakeholder needs. In times of volatility, the oversight and challenge from a board help drive better outcomes.

Boards outlast CEOs. In times of stability, CEO transitions add risk. In a more volatile backdrop, resilience and adaptability are more important than ever. The ability to execute a smooth transition from one leader to the next is material to performance at the best of times. Given the scale of today’s disruption, we consider succession planning to be a vital area to get right and we would advocate that investors engage proactively with boards on this crucial topic.

For instance, in our own portfolios, we exited a long-held successful position in a leading global food and drink services company on the back of a poorly executed CEO transition. We sold our holding following a series of leadership missteps in which management and the board missed strategic shifts in the business and fell short in addressing related labour unrest, both of which tarnished the customer experience. While this called for a change in leadership, the board was unprepared for succession, which created doubts for us over the company’s ability to sustain strong financial returns.

3. Supply chain resilience amid deglobalisation

The COVID pandemic helped companies recognise the risk inherent in global supply chains, driving greater supply chain diversification and nearshoring. A movement away from globalisation and a rise in geopolitical stress are driving growing protectionism and the implementation of tariffs, escalating the need to address supply chain risk. We see this as a major engagement topic for investors in the year ahead. Companies with strong brands and pricing power are better able to pass on higher costs from tariffs and supply chain diversification. Strong balance sheets provide an added source of resilience. Many of the companies in our portfolios have already moved to so-called local for local models, with in-market production capabilities that reduce the risk from tariffs. Many more were proactive post COVID building greater supply chain diversification. We hold a leading European fashion label where nearshoring has been a positive margin driver, supporting faster inventory turnover and more limited discounting. The company’s supply chain management has been equally focused on reducing modern slavery risks and building better sustainability credentials into their clothing. In contrast, many tech companies have proved to be especially vulnerable to heavy single-country supply chain dependence, where exposure to geopolitically sensitive markets like China have driven the need for greater reinvestment and shifting supply chain sourcing in the face of geopolitical stress.

A core investment framework

We think that a stewardship-led investment framework can help investors build a diversified core portfolio that is less correlated to the overall market. By combining a long-term perspective with day-to-day active value creation, we believe such an allocation can offer investors a potential source of superior long-term returns amid heightened cyclicality and disruption.