One way to find great investment opportunities is to ask yourself what must change over the years ahead. In this episode, Baillie Gifford partner Stuart Dunbar explores the increased use of robotics to fill gaps in the workforce and medical advances that help keep healthcare affordable, among other transformational themes.
Background:
Stuart Dunbar is a client relationship director and coordinates Baillie Gifford’s global marketing and product development activity, which includes responsibility for the firm’s Actual investors campaign.
For this Short Briefings… episode, he challenged himself to identify five transformational growth drivers that are both inevitable and investable. His picks cover:
- the rise of robotic systems that can make sense of their immediate environment and act autonomously
- the intelligent design of drugs and other efforts to deliver less costly, more effective healthcare
- the energy transition to renewables and electrification of transport
- greater dependence on the infrastructure underpinning digital payment systems
- the dawn of automated transport, including driverless trucks and delivery drones
Dunbar explains the factors making these forces of change necessary, including the ageing populations of many developed countries, the resulting labour shortages and rising medical budgets.
He also names some of the companies we have backed that could benefit, either by pioneering new or better ways of doing things or by playing critical roles in the involved supply chains. These range from John Deere & Co, whose self-driving tractors and precision-applied pesticide technologies help farmers increase yields and cut costs, to Nexans and Prysmian, whose extra-high-voltage cables connect offshore wind turbines to onshore energy grids.
Resources:
Actual investing: why thinking differently matters
Christiana Figueres: stubborn optimism
Eureka Alert: Cheryl Mehrkar’s robotic surgery
Michael Lewis: Going Infinite
Stuart Dunbar on growth investing (video)
Zeke Faux: Number Go Up
Past Short Briefings… episodes
Companies mentioned include:
Adyen
Amazon
Aurora Innovation
CATL
Coupang
Deere & Company
Enphase
Intuitive Surgical
Keyence
Moderna
Netflix
Nexans
Novo Nordisk
Nubank
Prysmian
Redwood Materials
Remitly
Renishaw
Wise
Zipline
Timecodes:
00:00 Introduction
1:30 Starting out in Hong Kong
2:20 Joining Baillie Gifford
3:20 The importance of optimism
4:30 Five inevitable, investable themes
5:45 Robotics and demographics
6:40 Investing in the rise of autonomous systems
8:30 Renishaw’s sensors
10:05 Intuitive Surgical and Deere & Co’s seeing robots
12:15 The intelligent design of drugs and Recursion Pharmaceuticals
15:40 Lower-cost healthcare
16:45 Selectively picking biotech winners
17:55 The energy transition and President Trump
19:40: Stubborn optimism
21:10 Undersea cables and solar installation
23:11 A new generation of payment providers
26:00 Delivery drones and self-driving vehicles
27:40 Focus on possibilities and what’s changing
28:35 Book picks – exploring cryptocurrencies
Short Briefings on Long Term Thinking - Baillie Gifford 
