Baillie Gifford China Growth Trust

Economic transition driving growth opportunities

22 July 2024

Baillie Gifford China Growth Trust (BGCG) focuses on innovative, growing Chinese companies with exposure to the massive opportunities generated by China’s vast market, its positive long-term economic outlook and its transition to a more diversified, innovation-led growth model. BGCG’s performance has lagged the declining market over recent years, despite the strong operational performance of most of its portfolio holdings. But the Chinese New Year heralded an improvement in market sentiment and, in recent months, BGCG has made outright gains and outperformed the market. In the three months to end-June 2024, the trust returned 3.3% in NAV terms, compared to a benchmark return of 0.4%. Its managers are cautiously optimistic about the prospects for the economy and the trust, and they have been taking advantage of still low valuations to enhance exposure to China’s best high-growth companies across a range of industries. MORE »

Year of a bull in motion

4 May 2021

Baillie Gifford China Growth (BGCG) is a recent entrant to Ballie Gifford’s (BG) house philosophy of investing alongside current trendsetters and future large-scale potential winners. It emerged in September 2020 as BG took over management of the trust, changing the strategy from broader Asia Pacific equities to a mandate of pure Chinese equities (see our initiation note on BGCG). Despite negative newsflow on China over the past few months clouding last year’s euphoria around investing in Chinese equities, the investment case stands firm. Amid heightened risks, for the time being China appears to welcome foreign investors, as it remains in expansion mode within the global financial markets. MORE »

China – we are only at the beginning

15 October 2020

The handover of Witan Pacific (WPC) to Baillie Gifford (BG) on 16 September 2020, following the board’s decision and favourable shareholders’ vote, marks the trust’s transition to the new asset manager. BG won the mandate with its proposal to transform the Asia Pacific growth and income trust into a pure China equity growth strategy. The manager considers that ‘still misunderstood and underinvested’ China (a c 2.5% allocation in 2019 global portfolios) is the key global growth market of the 21st century, and that global investors who miss out on the present China opportunity run the major risk of being left behind. MORE »