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Asia Rising: Global Tech Value Chain Dominance to Drive Portfolio Reallocation

Entext

Thu 16 Jul 2020 - 15:00

Summary

Sean is extremely bullish Asian Technology companies in which he predicts that top-line growth will be sustained for years due to many reasons including dominating in advanced material sciences from battery technology to semi manufacturing, and in sensors and robotic actuators. Meanwhile these companies are trading at a significant discount when compared to Western peers and have large revenue tailwinds, underscored by the current ‘stay at home’ reinvestment themes. Asian companies with piles of cash have seen increasing interest from activist investors looking to unlock value; take for example Elliott Advisors shaking up Softbank - the stock has doubled. Sean showed how China is offsetting US sanction pressures by creating a ‘Pan-Asia’ tech ecosystem deepening supply chains with neighbouring countries such as Taiwan, Japan and Korea. In terms of chip architecture China’s focus on open-source solutions (RISC-V) and open-source software with the largest number of GitHub contributors outside the US, will continue to circumvent restrictions. Sean highlighted Japanese companies particularly those focusing in niche areas such as 5G chipset manufacturing, and those pioneering the use of solid-state polymers and laser technologies. Sean mentioned the deep bioscience advancements in North Asia, highlighted by the very successful response to the pandemic. Asia continues to occupy an unrivalled position in gaming both through hardware consoles, e-sports and 5G roll out. Sean discussed his ‘Automation of Consumption’ theme as supply chains become AI managed self-regulating utilities, perfectly exemplified by JD.com. Asian companies mentioned included: **Hyundai, TSMC, Sony, Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, NetEase, JD.com, Samsung, STI, LG, MediaTek, SMIC, Pentax, Keyence, THK, Daifuku, Inovance, Toyota, BYD, Takeda, WuXi, BGI Genomics, Sony, Nintendo, Nidek, Kyoto.** European and US Companies mentioned included: **ASML, Ballard Power, ITM Power, Intel, Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco, Microsoft, SalesForce, Slack, Lam Research, Tesla, Sainsburys, Tesco, Ocado, Linde, Air Liquide, SDI, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Google, Amazon, Epic, Ubisoft, Netflix, Apple, ARM, Velodyne, Alphabet / Waymo, Cruise, Morotta.

Topics

China’s long-term technology challenge to the US - will Korea/Taiwan/Japan simply replace export restricted US vendors in a fully integrating Asian hardware supply chain?

How feasible is European/US reshoring of critical technologies from EV battery production to semi fabrication and at what cost?

Shift from (over) optimising slack to deliberately creating it to boost trend capex and inflation?

With many leading Asian high IP/deep moat technology hardware stocks trading at a low-mid teens multiples and a huge discount to US peers, will we see medium term reallocation flows out of US SaaS and chip names, and see a secular rise in regional share in MSCI AC?