Portfolio manager comments — Q1 2025
The first quarter of 2025 included a bit of drama for the equity market and led to the fund’s negative performance. The longer the quarter progressed, the more the market became concerned about how the Trump administration’s proposals for tariffs would impact the US economy and inflation. This created a major shift in sentiment with outflows from the US and instead into Europe. This affected not least the so-called MAG 7 companies, which as a group had weak returns in the quarter. The digitalization and AI themes ran into turbulence and posted weak performance after an unprecedentedly strong year. The weakness primarily consisted of short-term macroeconomic concerns, while the long-term structural growth for digital transformation remains.
The market began to question the resilience of the rate of growth for investments in infrastructure development related to data centers in conjunction with the presentation of the AI search engine Deepseek. This trend had a negative impact on the fund’s holdings with exposure to this driver, such as Nvidia, Vertiv, Broadcom, and Arista Technology. At the same time, it is also positive to find two Swedish digital consumer companies like Storytel and Spotify on the positive side of performance. Both of these companies continued to increase the number of satisfied users and reported strong results. Uber and Nintendo, which are companies with leading consumer platforms, also posted strength. The USD weakened against the SEK during the quarter, which had a negative impact on returns.
We increased exposure to Europe by adding Dassault System, slightly more aggressive European fiscal policy, while selling US Bentley System. In addition, the fund added the security company Cellebrite. The fund also, on the margin, reduced the exposure to high beta companies, such as Arista, Cloudflare and ServiceNow, while it increased the holdings in more defensive equities such as ExcelService. The fund also added Amazon to the portfolio at the end of the quarter, as we felt that the share have been oversold in conjunction with the general downturn.
As in previous quarters, companies within the digitalization theme will continue to be affected by the rapid growth underway within AI. Companies within different sectors are affected to varying degrees, although we expect those that can demonstrate benefits and profitability within their own AI strategies will have the best conditions for success.