Emerging Markets at an Inflection Point: AI, Energy Transition, and the Case for Active Investing

Thank you for choosing the Emerging Markets podcast by Tellamer, where we explore themes with leading international experts. Tellamer is the Emerging Markets Information Platform for professionals. To learn more about our services, visit Tellamer.com. Enjoy the conversation. Welcome to the Emerging Markets podcast by Tellamer, with me Duncan Wales, Founders and CEO of Tellamer. For this episode I'm delighted to be joined by Mike Gush, a partner of the leading international investment manager, Bailey Gifford. Mike is an investment manager in the Emerging Markets team, focused on emerging markets equities globally. Mike joined Bailey Gifford in 2003 on the graduate program. He spent time working in the UK and in Japanese equity teams before settling on the Emerging Markets desk in 2005. Since then, Mike has managed Asian, Chinese and broader EM funds throughout his career and has had research coverage responsibility for all the major emerging markets during his time in the team. Mike became a partner of Bailey Gifford in 2020. He is also the chair of the firms equity leadership group which oversees all the firms equity investment strategies. In addition, he has a key role in the AI leadership team and holds a strong belief that AI tools can help to improve investment outcomes for Bailey Gifford's clients. Mike is a CFDA childholder and holds an M-N from the University of Durham. Mike, welcome to the pod. It's great to be here. Thank you. Well, look, great to see you. So you are up in Edinburgh and I'm down in London. Is the weather any better way you are than where I am? I doubt that considerably. That's great. It's great. Very used to it. Yeah, it's a beautiful place in Edinburgh. I've sent it my best. Mike, you've obviously seen a huge amount of evolution in emerging market equities having been the forefront of the EM revolution on that front. I suppose the cliched view of EM equities is a very volatile cyclical, concentrated, illiquid, maybe natural resources and banking heavy marketplace. But we saw emerging market equities pretty much outperform everything else in the world last year. What do you think has changed in your career and what are the key factors that has changed it? I think you're absolutely right. The heuristic of people is still at emerging markets. It's a difficult, it's a difficult place to invest. It's a volatile place, but actually, as we saw in the performance last year, some of the biggest opportunities in the world today are coming from emerging markets. And I think this is something I really like to give a flavor for your listeners. Yeah, emerging markets aren't the risky place that people think they are anymore. Their fiscal position is good. They've got central banks that they're very credible now. They're not in the main finance with external or dollar capital. These are countries that have a much surrefooting than many developed markets today. And importantly, I'd better give them where we stop pickers first and foremost. We're looking for the great growth businesses of tomorrow. And lots of those are coming from emerging markets. The businesses that are really driving a lot of the big structural themes in the world today are based in emerging markets. Be that AI, the energy transition, these are really attractive features that need emerging markets companies to be able to deliver. So I think you're in much more stable footing than we have for many years. Certainly the 20 or so years I've been doing this. The companies are world class, genuinely world class companies coming through for emerging markets. And I think at the same time, you're not having to pay the world for them. We're at a point where valuations are still quite low and that's really exciting. And that's even after a decline in the value of the dollar. So this is not a cyclical phase we're going through. This is actually a bit of a a step change in terms of the value proposition for investors as they think about EM. Yeah, I really do think so. Over the last decade, certainly, you've had a much more stable footing. You know, there's structural facts are coming through and that's, you know, either driving some of the big things in the world today or even domestic economies within emerging markets really starting to deliver as people get wealthier or to spend on financial services or consumer goods. So there's a whole range of drivers within that emerging markets. Now, thus to not to say we still don't have some cyclical elements left, you know, and you mentioned some of commodities, some of the banks, etc. You know, they're all still passing past all of emerging markets, but we definitely see, you know, a different class of company coming through today than we have in the past. Fantastic. Well, look, you've touched on a lot of very interesting themes there. One, which is pre-optifying investors and normally enormously at the moment, you know, inducing a huge amount of anxiety and price volatility on its own, wars aside is AI and what it might do to tax sectors, but also it's a disruptive effect on, you know, employment and, you know, across the economic sort of value chain. I mean, how do you think about emerging markets and where they are in that tech transformation, that new age of AI? Is it going to be an acceleration or is it going to be a threat? Yeah, I massively positive and what's going on with artificial intelligence in the world today? I think it is genuinely going to change that the face of economies, that the workplace, how businesses look going forward, and I think that's a massive opportunity for very any business willing to really embrace what this technology can deliver. And for emerging markets, you know, some emerging markets are really at the forefront of what's going on. You know, if I look at businesses like TSMC in Taiwan, there isn't a business in the world today that doesn't use their products. You know, they have 90% share of leading out, so these are the AI chips. The Nvidia producers, they do produce, most of these are made by a single company TSMC in Taiwan, which is the emerging markets business. If you look at the high bandwidth memories of the type of memory that you need in order to do a lot of the stuff you're doing on artificial intelligence again, it's emerging markets businesses, it's some sort of electronics, it's S.K. high nicks, so two career businesses. And actually, you know, the question really is, you know, would we be able to go as fast without these businesses in the world today? And the answer is definitely not. They are genuinely world-class businesses with emerging markets. And they're really benefiting as sort of picks and shumbles to what's going on in the world today with AI. But increasingly, there are also businesses in emerging markets which are benefiting from deploying the AI tools and scale. So moving from training to inference, so actually using them day to day, and the progress in places like China is mind-blowing. You know, I think most of you all of this must be familiar with the deep-seek moment, where deep-seek the Chinese company brought out a model that was very close to the leading edge which was done at the time and no one expected it. Well, that rate of progress is just continuing. And the likes of Alibaba, Tencent, so some of the big platform businesses in China are really driving forward with AI use and finding ways to grow their businesses into the future which are really quite exciting. Yeah, as you say, that sort of deep-seek moment was a, it was an innovation moment. I think that's what sort of surprised everybody. It wasn't just a computing power moment. It was actually a model that required relatively less computing power and could still get very good results. So, I mean, you've mentioned a lot of names there. I mean, they are very concentrated in East Asia, so there's a lot of China and South Korea, but it feels like they are enabling and being joined by tech companies from Lover, or the emerging economies. Yeah, that's right. The possibilities for this technology are really quite exciting. I don't think they will touch most businesses in the world. So, specifically on AI that the, a lot of the e-commerce businesses, like the Maccada Libre, in Latin America, Allegro in Poland, these are businesses that will, you know, how will they deploy this technology will determine the future growth of these businesses? And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for management teams who are willing to invest now in this technology to really drive their business in the future. And it's no accident, something like the Maccada Libre is investing quite so heavily. And this is a business that we've known for. well over a decade with health for emergency markets for over a decade. It's one that you're several years ago. I had the pleasure of visiting their head office and meeting most of their senior management team in Buenos Aires in Argentina. And it was very clear then that they were thinking about how to that's how to capture that future growth. And that so many businesses you fail to do because they're dictated by short term cycles. And yet this is a business that is always invested for the long term. We'd be very confident that the investments they're putting in today, whilst they may impact short term profits are exactly the right thing to do to be able to grow quite so successfully in the future. And this is a business that has sustained growth well over 30% year and year for more quarters than I care to remember. It's been a fantastic business tapping into that e-carves opportunity. And that's America which still remains very under penetrated when you look at norms across the rest of the world. I mean you've changed me up a lot Mike because regular listeners might have heard me more than once. I'm a long suffering investor and a very modest investor in Macau de Libre. But that's great to hear. I think the idea, the entropy, the direction is inevitable as you expand tech enabled services. I was just thinking about the points you made about Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone manufacturer. You can go to rural bits of East or West Africa or any part of Sub-Saharan Africa and find somebody with a smartphone with a smartphone. And it's effectively allowed applications to include people in the tax net. In the wages, payments, money movement is taken friction out of remissances. It's really added to that economic force really out of the combination of smartphone and then applications that can be loaded onto them. And then of course Samsung has done very well with its own AI business. You're absolutely right. One business thing about when you talk about the leapfrogging and that blending between digital services and telecoms is relies industries in India. This used to be a you're refining petrochemical business. And then it had this outrageous idea that it was going to invest. I think it was about $35 billion at the time into a telecoms network. And at the time most people thought this was a really questionable capital allocation. And over time they've backed up that investment with excellent operational. Now some they now are the leading telecom provider in India. They've moved into retail and now they're doing the same with you energy. So I think one of the things about the emerging markets investors really get to know these businesses, understand the motivation for the management teams and be open minded about how these businesses are going to look in the future. A lot of the businesses we invest in are they're relatively early stage. Their economies are still developing. You know that there's a lot of fluidity and having management teams who really embrace those opportunities is what we should be looking for. That is a really interesting point because we often say that the development of emerging economies cannot be a reflection of the way developed economies go into a sort of economic sort of structures or even political structures. Emerging economies are all different and their path will be different. So one has to really understand them to get that level of clarity and conviction on the investment side. You know, the reliance as you say is a sort of industrial conglomerate. I mean I guess India does have more of a track record of having conglomerate groups with very diverse business interests. But it's a great example of what was really a sort of almost like an energy type business that is turning it's off into a platform type business and those platform opportunities are obviously something that EMS is doing in a very fundamental way. Maybe faster than developed economies. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And for us, we're looking for the exceptional companies. We're looking for growth businesses and when you're looking for those, you really have to back the management teams. We're looking for own businesses for multi-year periods. You know, names like a Tispecia or Cardi-Libre. We've owned these businesses for a well over a decade, almost two decades. What great choices both of those were. Yeah, absolutely. They've delivered excellent results for our clients over a long period of time. But that's the ambition. It's finding the growth businesses of tomorrow. And for that, you need to understand the business as well. You need to understand the vision of the management team. And then, you know, be a responsible holder of those businesses and allow them to flourish when they're continuing to make the right decisions, the right strategic decisions to grow the business going forward. I think it's really important, you know, in a world that's ever so, you know, that time horizons are shortening almost on a daily basis. Being able to be a long-term owner of some of these businesses is really quite important. Fantastic. So you have to do the sort of top down thematic, but also the bottom up, you know, the personalities, the attitude, the ambition of the management teams. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So we benefit through, you know, we've been doing this for over 30 years in emerging markets. So we started our own edge of markets, roughly back in 1994. And through that time, we've obviously enjoyed quite an interesting time, from time to time. There's been a lot of-- A few advantages. A few advantages. Asia crisis. Yeah. Exactly. So a lot of different markets environments within that. And actually, those businesses that we've had for long this, it's getting close to management teams and understanding what they're trying to achieve. And yes, they have to have a good growth opportunity that they've-- but it's all about the delivery and the execution on those businesses. Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so look, we see these really fundamental AI technology leadership in examples coming out of emerging markets. The other big, thematic issue that you alluded to at the beginning is energy transition. I know it's somewhat taken a bit of a backseat because, you know, world events and politics have somewhat overtaken the green agenda. But energy transition is obviously still going. And it's obviously going to have to happen. It's happening in lots of ways, you know. So we know China has invested a lot of effort and money in transition. We know that a lot of economies are diversifying their sources of energy. But as we electrify transport, you know, as humanity and we decompanise industry, and we have to build the components of the modern AI powered, you know, a clean energy world, all of that very much advantages emerging companies who are physically in the right place. Yeah, I think that's right. The attraction as brothers, you do have these really powerful structural themes that you'd come back to. And they really do benefit emerging markets companies, you know, for the energy transition, who has all the raw materials that the world needs in order to, you know, upgrade their grid infrastructure to produce the batteries needed for your electric vehicles to put in your next generation power plants, whatever the technology may be. And when you trace back these supply chains, they almost all come back in very degrees to emerging markets. Yeah, catalysts of business we've owned for some time now. And this is then leading the global leader in battery technology. And this is a business of Chinese business. Chinese market started to be 100 billion. We're definitely going with it. Something like that. But it's, you know, it's 40, almost 40 percent of global batteries across electric vehicles and grid storage. It's at the technological forefront, you know, it's investing in new technologies, working with its customers to develop the next generation of batteries. Open mind you don't where that technology may lead. But it's also standing on fantastic growth opportunity. You know, as the world continues to want more energy security, more national infrastructure, these are all themes that you're playing to the likes of a cattle on the batch side wall. Some of the commodities, you know, we really like some of the individual commodities that are playing into the energy transition theme, meet the aquifer. We've got holdings in first quantum, London mining, or something like lithium to the raw material that goes into batteries they ask you out. So these are areas that really do favor emerging markets. Yeah, absolutely. Those are all great examples of the critical mineral side of things. One of the things I was mumbling about earlier with cattle is it's multiples of hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap. I imagine not many people who aren't really following the space know that a lot of the EVs around the planet have actually got those Chinese built batteries inside them. We also talked about these leap-rogging opportunities. Again, my brain when I think about platform type plays comes back to people like C, where you have an attack infrastructure that allows you to do lots of different things that you can deliver multiple services through one affordable smartphone. Again, if we think about African examples on telecom, Safari, in East Africa, Jumeir, Econmos, West Africa, lots of examples in Southern Africa. But C, still in my mind as one of the early first movies, is a great example of what a platform play could look like. Do you think that is, like we were saying earlier, is that something that we think the M is just better to faster and more liberated at doing? I think emerging markets companies have definitely shown their proletariat in this space. The light and colour of the leap over we talked about C that you've just articulated very well, but a number of other platform businesses that are really. I think that fundamentally you can take that fixed immobile shift that a lot of emerging markets manage to leap-roag. And these were maybe 15 years ago now, but that jump in technology stack and that real ability to go direct to mobile jump over a lot of infrastructure that the West had been building of many years really did allow different business models to start to emerge. And the entrepreneurial features of a lot of the markets we operate in mean that you can really go very fast as an entrepreneur. You can really try things out to see if they were just, it's a very fluid environment. It's a very exciting, very dynamic environment for founders to bring businesses and see its roots were in gaming. You know, who thought a gaming business with a single-head product would then be the leading e-commerce business across the number of Southeast Asian businesses and then one of the leading e-commerce businesses in Brazil? These pethits and disabilities to do this. I remember a recent chip to China, C&DD, which is the don't really want to call the Uber of China, but to give you a listeners an idea of what this is, the sort of ride-hailing business in China. And they were entering Latin America and the way they were talking about that, it was just a yes, it's a fantastic opportunity. And I think most people in the West would be looking at going, well, how on earth do we do that? How on earth do we, you know, going to a different country, a different culture, a different different sort of regulatory environment and be quite cautious. But you know, is that appetite and ambition that I find so captivating with all the businesses that we invest in particularly in that sort of internet space and that new platform of businesses? Yeah, no, that's a brilliant example and it actually makes me wonder, you know, one of the disadvantages that development markets have is that because they were early first-movers, they have not only gone through several iterations of the tax stack, they've gone through multiple iterations of regulation. And so they have regulation designed for the past and they're trying to catch up with the future and nobody in development markets has any real appetite to remove or change institutions or change laws or re-plum the entire system, it's too complicated. It takes too much time and there are too many vested interests. So I actually wonder if the leapfrogging is not just tech, it's actually the whole psychological, legal, regulatory approach. You've just bypassed a load of things that are obsolete which are very difficult to remove out of the if not just the tech debt but the sort of infrastructure, legal infrastructure debt of development markets. I think the regulation levels in some western countries or regions definitely slow progress down which is unhelpful. But I think also there's if you look at some of the economies in which we invest in the emerging markets countries, a lot of the leapfrogging is going from nothing to something. So if I look at financial services, when we look at the likes of a new bank in Latin America, a lot of their customers and people who haven't been banking to before, so they're brand new customers. So you're benefiting from they don't have anything, they don't have the banking cap, they don't have a banking relationship and actually your capturing customers has an inter financial system. And that's a business that's gone from zero customers to 125 or so million customers in a very short space of time. These are businesses that can really scale very rapidly given the total orders of advancements we're seeing and they don't have some of the embedded behaviors that you were just discussing there as barriers to progress. So the growth rates really can be very attractive for our clients. Yeah, fantastic. So there's a sort of strange advantage to developing at this juncture in history when technology gives you the opportunities of doing some of these things really quickly. And so there are a variety of opportunities in the sectors outside just energy and AI, alternative financials and all the other ones you mentioned, which is fantastic. So look, it's very difficult to think about emerging market equities without thinking about China. China was incredibly dominant in the index, MSI EM index to the extent that MSI actually created EM without China, not because China is not important, actually the reserve reverse, which is China is so important, you can manage your China exposures as a separate pool, but China is still 25% or thereabouts of MSI EM. It's been through some up and down moments, but what's you'll take on China and particularly what do you think about China versus India? As India comes up? Yeah, I mean, so I was in China last year and it was very clear from that trip and the businesses we saw, the founders we spoke to, that it remains a really dynamic environment for private businesses. And you know, something exciting is going to take the world by storm, you know, it's probably going to come out of Silicon Valley or China. It really is that exciting and the way people think about managing their businesses, the opportunities that they can leverage the size of the domestic market environment. I think a lot of people are still stuck on like Euristic that everything's made in China, it's copycats, it's that kind of, you know, if the US doesn't import the load of goods from China, they can struggle. Well, actually, you know, exports from China to the US are down to about 20% of total export more to Southeast Asia and certainly we're seeing more leading businesses coming out to China, you know, a bit cattle, we've already discussed some of the autonomous driving, sort of a pony AI, you know, these are businesses and you know, when you're in China and you're you're protesting some of these vehicles in the autonomous driving and you know, really is eye-opening what is possible. I remember very clearly being in one of these vehicles going on the road and as I'm sure if you if you're listening to China, you know, most people don't follow all of the rules of the road as they're driving out and we're in the middle of the highway and someone just decided to stop right in front of the autonomous vehicle we're in and pop to the shops and as you do and I feel here we're in trouble. Thankfully, you know, it stopped so we haven't hit the vehicle in front of us because there were no other signs that it would be slowing down but no concern to it just reverse back up, wait for space in the traffic indicated round and we were on our way, you know, it's it is remarkable that you know, how technologically advanced and I think it goes back to some of your early points about the regulation being more permissive that as well, you know, China is absolutely set on this is critically important to our future autonomous driving AI technological advancement and so they've set those that regulatory environment in a way that really suits and progress. So, you know, I think there's fantastic opportunities within China, we've touched on some of them. There are lots of smaller businesses that you know, you know, listeners may not be familiar with, you know, one we really like San Ron. So this is a business that originally did sort of vowels heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems. It then got into the Tesla supply chain, supplying valves for their cooling system on the, you know, the Tesla vehicles. And now it's getting exciting because it's doing something actuators that go in the some robotics. So you say, you know, small business that's continued to innovate, continued to grow with its customers. And it's doing really well. Another one, Anka, which is the battery. I think most people in, you know, most people in the UK and other markets will be aware of, you know, they do a lot of peripherals that are high quality, but cheaper than sort of a branded alternative. And, you know, this is a Chinese business, does most of this business overseas exports a lot. And it's really, you know, quite in an exciting niche of being able to be one of the branded Chinese businesses that are winning in developed markets. Now you did ask me to contrast China and India. I think our concerns on India's, so it's one where we have less, you know, less money invested for our clients. It is one principle of valuation. So, you know, there are some great growth businesses in, in near, but it became flavor of the day. It became whatever it wanted to be where people were running out of China. And in, and that is cause valuations to really shoot up. And so for the relative growth, we will see, you get much higher growth and at a lower valuation in other markets. But there are some really interesting businesses within India. So, reliance we've discussed some of the names in the financial sector. So their life assurance industry is still at very early days and maturity. So, HDFC Life is one of the branding companies in that market that we really like. You know, a more recent position would be in Indigo Airlines. So this is one of the big low-cost carriers in India with a fantastic market share and an opportunity to really benefit as that middle class within India grows and starts to spend on leisure activities. So really exciting at the company level. Yeah. I mean, India has got this great advantage that still riding a demographic way if where China is actually beginning to go slightly negative. So China's economy is going to have to deal with a different set of issues and productivity increases that are going to have to help support them as the developed economies. Yeah, absolutely right. There are very different framing, but both give you excellent opportunities on your website. So I think both environments, they just give you different opportunities at different points there. And I think China in particular, the rate of productivity growth that they're still managing to achieve, how they're thinking about positioning technology and data as an able of that productivity growth is really quite exciting. So yes, they've got more of a test on the demographic side, but I think they've got the right vision of how to really continue to improve the structure of their economy going forward, which will make it an exciting place for investing for many years to come. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I was talking with an international investor a while ago and he reminded me that just the way the numbers work, if you have a population of a billion people and you assume that humans occupy a normal distribution of intelligence and that therefore, a relatively small percentage of people are genuinely sort of genius level exceptional, you know, the intellectual elites of humanity. There are just many, many more millions of them in a population of a billion. So if you are trying to do really difficult things solve really difficult, intractable human problems and healthcare and technology and sustainable development and energy transition, you know, and all of these sort of big, somatic issues, you just have more intellectual horsepower. And if you can make them all productive with AI, so much the better. So he had a very optimistic view, but he was therefore relatively less flattering about some of the developed economies where one of the population is smaller and two people aren't encouraged to solve the problems in the same way, which I thought was a bit harsh, but I kind of understood his point. Well, I think in China, you're definitely getting a top-down message from the government, how important technology is going to be, which roles are rewarded. You know, there's a much larger body of STEM graduates coming out to China than there are in Western economy. So there's a real focus being put on those skill sets and those careers. That's the ones. And don't forget, China is still, you know, it's a single party system. That's very comfortable for many of us who've grown up in a different political environment, but it's one that can take a longer-term view on a lot of factors. And one area I'd like to, you know, the I like to talk about is the electricity generation industry. So if you go back into a nice start, it's in 2022, 23 years ago, China's electricity generation capacity was about the same as the US. Give it a bit lower. Of the same order of magnitude. And this is one of the real crunch points we're seeing today with AI equipment and some of the struggles with data centers getting interesting. Well, in China over that 20-year period, the US annual capacity growth has been, you know, a single digit percentage. China's electricity generation has gone up about four-fold that time period. And that's because they looked ahead and so, well, we're going to make investment now because we can see what's coming down the track. And I think they're doing something very similar today with data. You know, data is centrally important to everything the world is doing with AI. And about five or six years ago, they called out data as their fifth factor of productivity, which sounded really odd at the time. But, you know, fast forward five years of starting to see why it's so important that data is put centrally in government planning. So I think there is a lesson, less than in there someone. The planning ahead for energy inevitably made me think about maybe some of the policy missteps with South Africa and they're not alone, but they're trying a few examples of political volatility not leading to strategic planning in a particularly neat way. Oh, absolutely. It's not to say that every emerging market has been, well, right. I think they're in the name that all getting better in terms of that ability to determine their own future. But of course, there's a huge variability. And I think that's a really important point, actually, you want to, you know, we're stopping as we're looking for the best companies within the emerging market countries in which we invest, but it's really important to have that ability to be to be active in emerging markets. You know, I think if you buy the entire emerging market, yes, you're getting exposure to the more classic class, but actually think it's move around. Would have worked last year. So it's really well, that leads us neatly onto that question then, because, you know, we've touched on a couple of times. Remember, it was only a couple of years ago that everybody in every market in the world was told that you should just put money on index trackers and the stock picking was a thing at the past and it was antiquated and it was irrelevant. And it turns out that index tracking is perfect when times are benign or gently growing or rapidly growing. They become a lot more problematic once you have inflation, rate cycles, unexpected or expected wars, you know, dislocations in supply chain or dislocations in asset valuations because of new technology technologies. So the case for active stock picking, I think is probably a tale when it goes back, isn't that at the moment? I certainly believe so. I mean, I think there is more risk and we can unpack or risk meet. I think there's more risk in an index at the moment than anywhere else. Even within emerging markets, you know, there's a lot of businesses which are state owned businesses in emerging markets. Now these can be great investments, but at the same time incentives are always aligned with minorities and you have to be very careful about those incentives and how businesses are being run and they're a time to when you want very little in those types of businesses because their objectives are to play for the national side and not one of its investments. So I think even in that frame, you want that flexibility to be able to have exposure or not exposure. And the same with different countries around emerging markets, you know, you articulate some of the problems with South Africa. You know, there are other countries in emerging markets which, you know, either do very well for a period or other times where you want to have less exposure and end of a year. companies. If you really are focused on finding growth businesses of the future, you need to be able to buy just those businesses and not buy all the businesses that they might be disrupting. And I think that's been become even more acute over the last few years. It was only three and a half years ago, you have the chat GPT moment. When suddenly everybody woke up to the capability and what might be possible. And now we're seeing lots of businesses being disrupted or people worrying about businesses being disrupted. And I think being able to have a exposure to emerging markets, which is taking the best businesses, the best growth businesses within that broader universe, should be a very attractive way to gain exposure. Fantastic. I mean, the normal accusation of thrown at emerging markets is that once you get past the top five or more potentially ten liquid names, liquidity is a bit of an issue. And certainly there's a bit of a steep drop off, although there was a perception that was a steep drop off, once you get out of the really big emerging markets. Do you think that is something that's changed? That has definitely changed. We have very deep and liquid markets now. Maybe some of your comments are still rather than frontier. But so the main emerging markets there is ample liquidity, China opening up the Asia market. Several years ago, you brings you a investment universe of thousands of companies or with very high liquidity on its own. We've had changes with the number of Middle Eastern countries being added to indices. A lot of new businesses come to market in India, in China, in Latin America. So there's been a real deepening of that opportunity set. And that's great to stop because we are really finding lots of businesses that meet our growth hurdle and really interesting. So look, you know, in a good news bad news, a lot more to investigate, which is burdensome, but a lot more opportunity. Absolutely. I mean, we've been doing this for since 94, as I've said, 30 years I've been doing this personally for over 20 years and today the opportunity set is as attractive as I've seen it. If I look at the stability of the economies in which we can invest in, if I look at the type of companies, the quality of the businesses that we can invest in today. And the last one is just the valuations. You know, it's much lower than many developed markets and you're getting high growth rates, low volatility. I you know, all the ingredients are there and you know, we saw a really positive result last year in sort of share price terms and things are still really well-independent. There's a great valuation argument the strong growth coming through. It's a really exciting time to be the best in this space. Fantastic. Well, Mike, that is brilliant and on that extremely positive note, you know, global macroeconomic forces aside, you know, it feels like the world has changed and all these wonderful opportunities exist. Good staff, well, Mike, thank you so much for your fascinating insights. Absolutely brilliant to have you on and thank you for listening to the emerging market's podcast by Tellema. We will see you again next time. This podcast is provided for information purposes and represents the personal opinions of the speakers. It is not an offer or solicitation for investment in any securities nor should it be regarded as investment advice. Tellema technology is limited, does not offer or provide advice and no mention of a particular security in this podcast constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell or hold that or any security portfolio of securities or enter any transaction or investment strategy. Nor is any such mention and indication that any investment is suitable for any specific person. For more information, please visit Tellema.com.