Investment Pitches

Pitch Summary:
BCI contributed positively (+1.7%) as progress continued on its flagship Mardie Salt & Potash project. The fund notes stable project execution and favorable commodity pricing dynamics. Continued offtake agreements and government support underpin near-term confidence.

BSD Analysis:
BCI is developing the Mardie salt and potash project, one of Australia’s most strategically significant brine assets — but also one of its most capital-intensive. Execution and financing remain the key swing factors. If the project stays on schedule, Mardie offers multi-decade, low-cost production with global demand tailwinds. Investors remain cautious due to capex blowouts and construction risk. The stock trades like the project won’t make it — high skepticism baked in. If Mardie stabilizes, upside is enormous. A high-beta resources development story with binary seasoning.

Pitch Summary:
Fleetwood rose 2.4% during the quarter as modular housing demand strengthened and execution improved. Sandon continues to see long-term upside from government housing initiatives and infrastructure projects. The company remains a top holding due to disciplined management and asset-light growth potential.

BSD Analysis:
Fleetwood is a diversified modular building and RV business benefiting from strong demand in government, mining, and infrastructure accommodation projects. Margins are improving after years of restructuring and portfolio cleanup. The modular segment is positioned for multi-year growth as housing and resource projects proliferate. The market still views Fleetwood as a cyclical RV name — outdated and incorrect. Visibility is improving, leverage is low, and execution is cleaner. A reborn industrial with a better runway than investors assume.

Pitch Summary:
COG Financial Services was the largest positive contributor in September. The firm announced the acquisition of EasiFleet Pty Ltd, a salary packaging and novated leasing business, for $40 million via subsidiary Paywise. This acquisition expands government contracts across Western Australia, Northern Territory, Tasmania, Queensland, and the ACT, and positions Paywise for the NSW and Victorian government tenders. Sandon notes COG’s strong net cash position and capacity for further acquisitions.

BSD Analysis:
COG is a niche Australian finance aggregator and broker platform with strong recurring revenue from equipment finance and SME lending. The business is asset-light, cash-generative, and structurally supported by independent broker consolidation. Execution remains disciplined, and margins are improving. Despite this, COG trades at a microcap discount that doesn’t reflect its quality. Regulatory risk is low, and end-market demand is steady. A quiet but durable financial-platform compounder.

Pitch Summary:
Sandon Capital expressed significant concern after Southern Cross Media announced a nil-premium reverse takeover of Seven West Media. The letter argues that the deal effectively hands control to SWM’s board and management despite SXL technically holding 50.1% of the merged entity. Sandon describes the transaction as deeply flawed, exploiting a loophole that prevents SXL shareholders from voting, and criticizes directors for abandoning the “All About Audio” strategy that had been succeeding following the sale of television assets. The fund intends to campaign against the merger through the AGM.

BSD Analysis:
Southern Cross sits in the brutal Australian broadcast media space, but cost-cutting and digital investment have stabilized the ship. Advertiser trends remain volatile, but SXL’s network scale provides resilience. The stock trades like bankruptcy risk despite tangible improvement in fundamentals. Execution still matters — small misses hit hard — but the valuation already prices in carnage. Any normalization in ad spending offers big torque. A speculative media turnaround with asymmetric upside.

Pitch Summary:
CKH, controlled by the Li family, operates across five key sectors: retail, ports, telecoms, infrastructure, and energy… Strikingly, the group’s current market capitalisation is roughly equivalent to its listed investments, which represent only around 35% of its gross asset value… CKH trades at just 8x forward earnings and 0.4x book value despite its resilient, cash-generative assets. Management has shown willingness to unlock value, most notably through its UK telecoms merger with Vodafone and the HKD148bn sale of most of its ports business.

BSD Analysis:
CK Hutchison is a diversified conglomerate with telecom, ports, infrastructure, and retail businesses that throw off stable cash. The stock trades at one of the steepest conglomerate discounts in Asia. Execution is solid, but investor apathy is extreme. The balance sheet is strong, the dividend attractive, and asset quality far better than the valuation implies. CKH isn’t going to deliver explosive growth, but it doesn’t need to — it needs recognition. Sum-of-the-parts value is substantial. A classic deep-value Hong Kong holding company.

Pitch Summary:
Alibaba announced solid Q2 results, but the key headline was the continued acceleration of the cloud business where revenue growth accelerated to 26%, compared with 6% in the same quarter a year ago. Alibaba is emerging as a winner in the Chinese AI ecosystem.While we are cautious about the excesses surrounding many AI-related names, our positions in Samsung and Alibaba reflect a different way of gaining exposure. Both companies trade at valuation levels far removed from bubble territory, are backed by strong balance sheets, and living within their means. Samsung, as the world’s leading memory producer, is positioned to benefit from rising demand for memory. Alibaba, meanwhile, combines a core e-commerce franchise with a cloud business that is emerging as a winner in China’s AI ecosystem.

BSD Analysis:
Alibaba’s reset is gaining traction — Taobao stabilizing, Cloud reaccelerating, and cost discipline pushing margins back up. Regulatory risk is yesterday’s story, but the stock still trades like Beijing is at war with it. Buybacks are enormous, cash flow is strong, and the valuation is absurdly cheap for an asset this strategic. The breakup confusion is gone; execution focus is back. Market sentiment remains far more pessimistic than fundamentals warrant. If China sentiment even partially normalizes, Alibaba’s rerating is violent. A mega-cap value dislocation.

Pitch Summary:
Samsung has benefited from the recent commitments for capital investment in AI by the largest cloud and model providers. This is leading to a shortage in its key memory products, especially DRAM, where prices have risen substantially. The shares have re-rated to 1.3x price to book. In 2017 and 2021 during prior bull markets the shares peaked at close to 1.8x price to book. Furthermore SK Hynix, Samsung’s closest peer, used to trade in line with Samsung until 2023 but is now valued at over 3x price to book.

BSD Analysis:
Samsung is entering a multiyear earnings expansion driven by memory, HBM, and AI-centric storage demand. Foundry still trails TSMC, but progress is real and the long-term ambition is intact. Mobile and consumer electronics remain cash cows. The balance sheet is fortress-level, giving Samsung unlimited optionality. Investors still price Samsung like a cyclical hardware maker despite its strategic role in global AI infrastructure. Memory scarcity and AI capex shift the earnings profile dramatically. A global tech heavyweight meaningfully undervalued versus its importance.

Pitch Summary:
The same pattern shows up with CVS. The company is often written off as too complex because of its sprawl across pharmacy, pharmacy benefit managers (PBM), and managed care, but CVS is quietly improving. Leverage is falling, management has repriced its Medicare Advantage offerings, and early 2025 results show progress. The PBM business still carries regulatory overhang. However, the momentum behind sweeping reform has waned, and retail pharmacy margins have stabilized. What’s more, CVS has scale advantages across its verticals, multiple cash flow levers, and a management team that is focused on balance sheet repair. Yet the company’s bonds still trade at a discount to peers like UnitedHealth and Elevance.

BSD Analysis:
CVS is absorbing hits from every angle — PBM scrutiny, retail weakness, and medical-cost pressure — but none of it breaks the long-term model. The integrated pharmacy–insurance–care delivery platform gives CVS leverage competitors can’t match. Cash generation remains strong, and deleveraging is underway. Bears are extrapolating short-term noise into structural decline. The valuation is crisis-level cheap for a company of this scale and defensiveness. If even one segment stabilizes, the stock meaningfully rerates. CVS is messy — but massively undervalued.

Pitch Summary:
In the managed care space, Centene has faced margin pressure as its utilization has risen faster than expected, which has quickly fueled a narrative about structural risk in Medicaid and the exchanges. In our analysis, the company’s fundamentals suggest something less dramatic: Centene remains the market leader, has repriced the majority of its Medicaid contracts, and is preparing for meaningfully higher exchange pricing in 2026. Membership will decline as pricing resets, but we believe those losses are already priced in. Over time, we expect Centene to revert to mid-single-digit margins with strong cash generation — a profile that aligns with investment-grade credit.

BSD Analysis:
Centene is stabilizing after years of messy execution, with Medicaid redeterminations mostly behind it and margins gradually normalizing. The company’s scale in government-sponsored healthcare gives it a durable competitive moat. Cost discipline and portfolio simplification are paying off. Sentiment remains skeptical due to past missteps, which creates valuation upside as performance cleans up. CNC is not a fast grower, but it is a steady one. A risk-reward setup tilted toward recovery, not decline. Solid operator in an unloved corner of healthcare.

Pitch Summary:
Take Alexandria Real Estate. Headlines about weak biotech funding and oversupply have weighed on sentiment, but the company owns irreplaceable campuses in Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. Plus, demand from large-cap pharma and research institutions is steady, even as smaller biotech faces funding pressure. In addition, new construction is slowing, which eases supply concerns, and we think the company’s balance sheet is among the strongest in the REIT space. Yet the company’s spreads imply permanent damage to asset quality and funding strength that simply isn’t there.

BSD Analysis:
ARE owns the most irreplaceable life-science real estate portfolio in the world — coastal clusters that biotech and pharma can’t replicate elsewhere. Biotech funding softness pressured sentiment, but occupancy, rents, and tenant quality remain extremely strong. Supply is limited and specialized; labs don’t move to commodity office buildings. The balance sheet is solid and development risk is falling. The stock still trades as if the sector is collapsing. ARE remains the highest-quality REIT for science infrastructure. A mispriced premier asset platform.

Pitch Summary:
SAP’s (SAP) shares came under pressure during the quarter amid investor concerns that autonomous AI agents could disrupt incumbent software-as-a-service providers, alongside broader worries about IT budgets and U.S. public sector spending trends. Despite these headwinds, we believe SAP is well positioned to migrate its large, on-premises ERP customer base to its modern S4/Hana cloud platform. This transition drives a ~2.5x increase in average revenue per customer through broader service adoption.
Recent results highlight strong execution against this strategy, with current cloud backlog up 29% year-over-year, total backlog up 40%, and cloud ERP suite growth of 35% in calendar 2024. These metrics support management’s outlook for accelerating growth through 2027, underpinned by continued customer migrations and efficiency gains from cloud-based operations. We believe this transformation should drive sustained growth in revenue, earnings, and cash flow over our investment horizon.

BSD Analysis:
SAP’s cloud transition is finally hitting real scale, with RISE and S/4HANA driving recurring revenue and deepening customer lock-in across global enterprises. The company has executed a rare pivot: moving from slow, maintenance-heavy legacy software to a scalable, high-margin subscription engine. Cloud backlog keeps growing, signaling multi-year visibility that the market still undervalues. SAP’s positioning inside mission-critical workflows makes churn nearly impossible, giving it a moat more durable than most SaaS peers claim. Margins are inflecting as the mix shifts and operational discipline improves. Bears underestimate how early SAP is in this monetization cycle. This is a long-duration European software compounder hiding in plain sight.

Pitch Summary:
Intuit’s (INTU) shares came under pressure during the quarter as investors grew concerned that autonomous AI agents could weaken the competitive position of traditional software-as-a-service providers. While we acknowledge these dynamics, we believe Intuit is well positioned to benefit from the shift. Over five years ago, management invested heavily in an AI-driven expert platform that blends artificial intelligence with human expertise. This strategy has yielded “done-for-you” solutions across TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma, including TurboTax Live, now a $2 billion business that grew over 40% in FY 2025. With agentic AI likely to become pervasive across enterprise software, we believe Intuit is well placed to harness these capabilities, supporting above-average revenue and earnings growth over our investment horizon.

BSD Analysis:
Intuit owns small business financial software and consumer tax — two categories with extreme stickiness and structural pricing power. AI features in QuickBooks and TurboTax deepen user integration and widen the moat. The ecosystem flywheel keeps spinning: payroll → payments → marketing → compliance. Intuit’s operating leverage is elite, and churn is almost nonexistent. The company isn’t cheap, but neither is dominance.

Pitch Summary:
Amphenol (APH) delivered strong Q2 results and provided an upbeat Q3 outlook, which were both well received by investors. Revenue growth is being supported by AI-related product design wins, including contributions to NVIDIA’s new Blackwell NVL platform, expected to ramp in the second half of 2025. Beyond IT datacom and AI, Amphenol benefits from a diversified portfolio across a wide range of end markets, all tied to the secular trend of greater connectivity and intelligence in devices. Coupled with its entrepreneurial culture, disciplined capital allocation, and leading market position, Amphenol appears to be well positioned to gain share in the global connector market, while sustaining best-in-class margins and returns on invested capital.

BSD Analysis:
Amphenol is an electrification powerhouse hiding behind a “connectors” label — automotive, aerospace, industrial automation, defense, cloud — it’s everywhere electrons need to move reliably. Its decentralized operating model and consistent M&A strategy produce some of the cleanest margins in industrial tech. End-market diversity makes earnings absurdly stable. This isn’t a cyclical industrial; it’s a quiet compounder with decades-long tailwinds.

Pitch Summary:
Oracle’s stock responded positively to its FQ1 2026 (August quarter) results, which many on Wall Street have characterized as the company’s “NVIDIA moment.” Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO; like contracted bookings) increased by $317 billion sequentially, reaching approximately $455 billion. This unprecedented surge was driven by four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three large customers who support training and inference workloads for leading large language model providers.
Management outlined a multi-year revenue roadmap that calls for $144 billion in its OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenue by FY 2030, a striking step-up from approximately $10 billion reported in FY 2025. The scale and duration of these contracts are unmatched in the industry, and Oracle expects additional multi-billion-dollar deals to push RPO beyond $500 billion by fiscal year-end 2026. We believe Oracle is emerging as a Tier-1 hyperscale cloud provider, now viewed as a true peer to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS.
While IaaS revenue carries lower gross margins compared to Oracle’s core database and enterprise SaaS businesses, the sheer scale of growth is set to drive accelerating revenue and EPS expansion over the intermediate term. We continue to hold our position in ORCL as the company gains meaningful share in the rapidly expanding generative AI market.

BSD Analysis:
Oracle’s AI cloud has gone from punchline to legitimate contender, with OCI’s low-latency network and aggressive GPU rollout winning surprising enterprise workloads. The database modernization cycle is sticky, recurring, and margin-rich. Cerner is stabilizing and no longer a drag on the story. The market still values Oracle like a melting legacy vendor, but the cloud trajectory says otherwise. Quietly, Oracle has become a second-derivative AI infrastructure play that’s still materially undervalued.

Pitch Summary:
Apple shares rebounded in Q3 2025 as investor concerns over both tariffs and the early adoption of its generative AI product, Apple Intelligence, eased. Attention shifted instead to the favorable resolution of Alphabet’s DOJ trial, seen as a positive for both Apple and Alphabet, and to healthy initial demand for the fall launch of the iPhone 17.
We continue to view Apple as a competitively advantaged business, anchored by the strength of its ecosystem. With over 2 billion active devices and more than 1 billion paying subscribers, Apple benefits from a loyal customer base and a growing stream of high-margin, recurring services revenue. This stable cash flow enables continued investment in innovation, even during periods of cyclical softness. We believe Apple remains well positioned to lead in the emerging category of AI-enabled edge devices.

BSD Analysis:
Apple’s growth engine isn’t flashy right now, but its profit machine is still unmatched — ecosystem lock-in, premium pricing, and a services mix that prints cash even in a lukewarm hardware cycle. AI integration is late but not irrelevant; Apple has a history of turning “slow starts” into industry dominance once the UX is perfected. With gross margins near all-time highs and buybacks as aggressive as ever, the stock remains a safe compounder wrapped in an underestimated innovation cycle. It’s not high-torque, but it’s bulletproof.

Pitch Summary:
Speaking of energy, Drax has executed a herculean shift, moving from fossil fuels to become the UK’s largest renewable energy provider. It now supplies around 5% of the nation’s power. Our Kernow valuation framework indicates a value of £5bn. The market says £2.5bn. That gap made us take a closer look.
The crux is whether new favourable contracts will be agreed for its assets. Currently, these are disliked by all parties. Shipping Canadian forests across the ocean just to set them on fire in Yorkshire upsets everyone. Environmentalists call them a crime, fossil fuel loyalists call them a joke, and the trees are not particularly keen on it either.
Even so, power is life. Policy will change, and Drax has demonstrated its ability to adapt. We are drawn to this puzzle of uncertainty and have yet to figure it out. It could take more than a year.

BSD Analysis:
Drax sits at the center of the U.K.’s energy transition debate — part renewable champion, part political punching bag. Biomass economics are strong, earnings are stable, and the company’s long-term BECCS strategy provides massive upside if policy aligns. Markets hate uncertainty, but Drax’s assets are high-quality cash generators. A controversial setup with asymmetric optionality if subsidies go their way.

Pitch Summary:
Wise appears meaningfully undervalued when compared to Revolut’s latest US$75bn valuation round. That comparison implies a fair value for Wise closer to US$35bn. Today, it trades at just US$14bn. The company’s US expansion is gaining real traction. If execution continues, a re-rating over the next 18 months looks well within reach.

BSD Analysis:
Wise keeps disrupting cross-border payments with unbeatable fees, fast settlement, and a user base that keeps compounding. The float income kicker remains strong as higher rates flow through earnings. Operating leverage is showing up, churn is low, and Wise’s regulatory and compliance moat is deeper than critics admit. The stock trades like a niche fintech when in reality Wise is taking global share at scale. A stealth long-term compounder.

Pitch Summary:
Saga took centre stage as its interim results beat expectations. The new management team is proving it can steer this towards becoming a £100m free cash flow machine. The rise of the wealthy 50+ silver pound demographic may be the most potent and persistent force shaping Western economies today. It is more predictable than AI and one heck of a long-term tailwind.
A business in that space growing with solid metrics deserves a premium rating. Yet, its market cap sits at just £400m. For context, the founding family sold Saga in 2004 for more than £2bn in today’s money. That was before private equity got hold of it and bled it dry.

BSD Analysis:
Saga is still a messy balance-sheet story, but its cruise business is quietly performing exceptionally well with strong bookings and resilient pricing. Insurance is stabilizing after years of underperformance. Deleveraging remains the swing factor, but operational momentum is better than the narrative. The equity trades like it’s terminal, which is wildly disconnected from improving fundamentals. If Saga simply avoids big mistakes, the upside is meaningful.

Pitch Summary:
ATOSS Software, a founder-led HR tech company, continues its cloud transformation with recurring revenues reaching 70%. The firm targets 16% software growth and doubling revenue to €400M by 2030. Five AI-powered services are live, with additional agentic AI tools in development. Despite temporary weakness in its legacy license business, Hertford remains confident in long-term compounding potential, reinforced by insider buying.

BSD Analysis:
ATOSS is one of Europe’s highest-quality workforce-management SaaS platforms, with razor-sharp execution, recurring revenue north of 90%, and expanding cloud margins. Demand for labor optimization and compliance automation remains strong even in mixed macro conditions. Pricing power is exceptional, churn is minimal, and international expansion is accelerating. Despite its consistency, ATOSS still trades below global SaaS peers with weaker economics. This remains one of the cleanest mid-cap software compounders in Europe.

Pitch Summary:
LSL has completed its transition from a cyclical estate agency operator to a franchise-based, capital-light business. Its three divisions—Financial Services, Surveying & Valuation, and Estate Agency Franchising—now provide diversified income streams with high cash generation. Management expects margin expansion and valuation re-rating as clean results come through. Hertford added on weakness, expecting 10% free cash flow yields in 2026 and steady buybacks.

BSD Analysis:
LSL is working through a weak U.K. housing backdrop, but the strategic pivot toward financial services and franchising is setting up a more stable, higher-margin business mix. Estate-agency transaction volumes remain soft, yet cost actions and portfolio simplification are improving operational leverage. Financial services distribution provides recurring revenue and more consistent economics. Sentiment remains poor, but the long-term transformation is credible. LSL screens as a cyclical recovery story with meaningful self-help embedded.