Fund manager James Anderson has said his privileged access to some of the US technology titans does not blind him to how they use their power.
The co-manager of Baillie Gifford’s £3.7billion Scottish Mortgage trust says the Edinburgh voice has “pushed Amazon quite hard on the issue of taxation” and discussed conditions inside their distribution centres (he has been round the Dunfermline site). Whilst not claiming any credit, he notes that the Jeff Bezos empire has adopted less aggressive tax structures. He adds: “We have not just talked to Bezos but to independent members of the board, they actually like to hear from long-standing shareholders.”
Mr Anderson says opinion polls outside the US show technology companies are more popular than any other institutions. But he adds: “These companies are becoming so powerful and dominant you have to think about what that does to society at large. We do think we have broader responsibilities as shareholders both in terms of timeframes and also what type of society this leads to.”
The trust has eight per cent of its portfolio in Amazon, and Facebook, Google and Chinese internet stocks Alibaba and Baidu are in its top 10 holdings. It is the best-performing trust over three years in the 35-strong global growth sector, and third best over one year.
Both Mr Anderson and co-manager Tom Slater regularly beat physical paths to the doors of the US west coast wealth creators, using privileged access granted them by the loyal shareholdings of the FTSE’s biggest investment trust.
“Tom and I were seeing Twitter last week in San Francisco,” Mr Anderson said. “When they asked what they need to do better, we said you have got all this very valuable intellectual content that dates from years back and you need to find ways people can get to that.”
The trust was allotted a “generous allocation” of shares on Twitter’s IPO, the manager says, and “after a long debate internally” picked up more shares when the price started falling.
On his love affair with Silicon Valley, and his belief that fund managers should be almost anywhere but the office desk, Mr Anderson says: “I’m amazed that more people haven’t followed this model of going about things. The Sun Valley conference has a unique ability to attract the inventors of our modern world.”
But Baillie Gifford is the only European investment house to get itself invited to that star-spangled gathering, known as one of the few that can tempt legendary investor Warren Buffett.
“In the context of our portfolios we get to have meetings with Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook) and Elon Musk (electric carmaker Tesla) - 80 per cent of our portfolio would be there,” Mr Anderson says.
“I am not downbeat about various other centres and their ability to generate companies, but there is something profoundly special which is hard to imitate outside Silicon Valley. A lot of it is a deep sense of being willing to reinvent the world and go back to first principles, the ability to grasp the dimensions of change is something I don’t see anywhere else.”
Scottish Mortgage’s biggest holding is gene technology pioneer Illumina, and its managers see healthcare as the next big area of exponential advances, possibly followed by education. Mr Anderson says: “Top-notch education that costs $100,000 a year can probably be provided at a profit for $500.”
The trust has15 per cent in China. But Mr Anderson says power is an issue there too “if most of what is being created elsewhere in China is getting swallowed up by the ‘big three”.
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