Guinness Greater China Fund

The Guinness Greater China Fund invests in quality, profitable companies which give exposure to the structural growth themes in China. 

The process is designed to give this exposure while mitigating the risks involved with investing in China. The Fund also has a valuation discipline designed to avoid overpaying for future growth. 

The Chinese economy is the second largest in the world, and we think at some point it will surpass the US to become the world’s largest. However, China’s share of global equity markets is much smaller than its share of GDP, in stark contrast to other major economies. We believe that over time this gap should close, and Chinese markets are likely to take up a significantly larger share of major equity benchmarks. We expect that in the medium term, many investors are likely split China out of their emerging markets allocation and may have a dedicated China equity allocation. Therefore, investors should be thinking seriously about China today, in order to take advantage of this expected future demand.

Although investing in China presents many opportunities, it also brings challenges. These include government influence, relatively volatile equity markets, market access issues, corporate governance, language barriers, geopolitical tensions and accounting issues. While these are real challenges, we do not believe they are insurmountable. With a carefully designed process, we argue, investors can avoid companies which are exposed to these issues. 

We adopt a disciplined approach towards investing in China. We keep it as simple as we can, so it is both understandable and repeatable on a consistent basis. We identify what we believe are China’s long-term structural growth themes and have created an investment universe of companies that we believe are best placed to convert these themes into superior profitability. To enter our investment universe, a company not only needs to give exposure to one of the themes, but must also have a superior cash return on investment without having excessive debt on its balance sheet. From this universe we select a small group of companies for the portfolio whose current market price undervalues the probable future returns on capital over the next three to five years.