Carmignac Portfolio Emergents: Letter from the Fund Managers - Q2 2025

Over the second quarter, Carmignac Portfolio Emergents F EUR Acc recorded a positive performance of +5.8%, compared to +3.1% for its reference indicator¹. Yet, the quarter began under challenging conditions, marked by President Trump’s announcement of particularly high tariffs on imports, notably those from China. Despite this context, emerging markets not only posted positive returns but also outperformed both developed and U.S. markets. This outperformance can be attributed to investors' realization that Trump's isolationist policy was likely to be more detrimental to the United States than to its trading partners.

Furthermore, China demonstrated its negotiation leverage by using its control over rare metal refining, thereby enforcing a trade truce with the United States and obtaining a relaxation of the restrictions on the export of Nvidia’s high-performance chips.

The fund’s strong performance over the quarter was largely driven by Latin America.
Our main positions in the region, which form the core of our LatAm portfolio — such as Banorte and Mercado Libre — significantly outperformed. Mexico has benefited from the protection provided by the USMCA free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, positioning it as a likely winner in the current economic and geopolitical environment. Moreover, Claudia Sheinbaum, despite having a temperament and political stance very different from Trump’s, opted to avoid confrontation by reinforcing border controls. This approach allowed Trump to claim a symbolic victory on the issue of migration.

Among other positive contributors to the fund’s performance, our holdings in companies linked to artificial intelligence — such as TSMC, Hynix, and Elite Material — also deserve mention.

This theme plays a central role in our investment process, and Asia is home to many key players in the field. This is why we increased our position in Hynix at the beginning of the quarter. Hynix’s HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) chips, used by Nvidia for AI applications, have disrupted the market to its advantage, while Samsung’s competing products have yet to receive Nvidia certification. As of June 30, Hynix represented 5.4% of the fund.

Hynix also benefited from the sharp rally in the South Korean market following the election of Lee Jae-Myung as president on June 3. Upon taking office, President Lee announced plans to encourage large Korean conglomerates, or chaebols, to improve corporate governance — a move that sparked strong enthusiasm in the markets. We took this opportunity to exit our position in Samsung, whose foundry investments have not managed to close the gap with TSMC, the clear market leader with a near-monopoly in the segment. The disappointing returns of Samsung’s foundry division and its loss of leadership in the memory market make the company less attractive to us than in the past.

During the quarter, we did not make any changes to our Indian portfolio (18.8% of the fund), but we increased our exposure to Southeast Asia. We initiated a position in the Indonesian private bank Bank Central Asia, which fully meets the criteria of our investment process.

The first criterion relates to the underpenetration of the banking sector in Indonesia: with a bank credit-to-GDP ratio of just 31%³, the level remains exceptionally low — not only compared to developed markets but also relative to other emerging economies. Among major emerging markets, only Argentina has a lower penetration rate, largely due to the repeated economic crises it has experienced.

Indonesia, by contrast, enjoys steady growth of around 5%, a low sovereign debt level (39% of GDP), moderate inflation near 2%, and a solid balance of payments⁴. These factors provide a supportive environment for stable and sustainable growth in the years — if not decades — ahead.

In addition, Bank Central Asia stands out as the only major privately-owned bank in the country, with all other large institutions being state-owned. This setup is reminiscent of India, where private banks have gradually gained market share from public sector banks thanks to greater operational efficiency. Bank Central Asia has a robust financial structure, with a Tier 1 ratio of 27%, a low non-performing loan ratio of 2%, and a return on equity exceeding 20%⁵. Following a more than 25% underperformance over the past year⁶, the stock’s valuation appeared attractive to us, with its P/E ratio falling below its long-term average. This led us to initiate a position in the stock.

This quarter was also marked by the strengthening of the investment team, with the appointment of Naomi Waistell as co-portfolio manager of Carmignac Emergents.

With nearly 16 years of experience in emerging markets management, Naomi fully embraces the fund’s investment philosophy, focusing on high-quality companies with strong growth prospects and resilient business models capable of generating sufficient free cash flow to sustain performance, even during economic slowdowns.

We are confident that our investment process, which serves as our compass, will continue to guide us in delivering strong performance over the coming years, particularly as a new bull market appears to be taking shape in an asset class that many investors had long overlooked in favor of U.S. markets.

The recent weakness of the dollar and the US bond market is paving the way for a reallocation towards emerging markets, which remain significantly underweight in asset allocators' portfolios. This is all the more true given that the average 2026 price earnings (P/E) ratio for emerging countries is 11.1x, compared with 18.4x for developed markets. According to a recent JP Morgan study, if emerging markets simply reached a weighting equivalent to that of the MSCI AC World benchmark, this would result in an estimated $1.5 trillion flowing into emerging market equities⁷.