The third quarter marked a busy period of company engagements, investment and client travel, and filming some exciting content for our website (snapshots on our postcards page!).

In our latest active ownership report, we reflect on the importance of engagement as a long-term active equity owner and zero in on a few recent examples of where the investment team’s active engagement and voting actions have helped influence key movements within some of our investment holdings.

As diversified, global generalists, we continuously monitor and engage with our businesses but very rarely seek to take an ‘activist campaign’ stance. In this report, we highlight offshore drilling company Shelf Drilling, where our engagement efforts as a top 10 shareholder helped drive a materially improved bid as it underwent an acquisition offer from ADES.

We also share an update on the bid by Toyota Motor Corp to privatise Toyota Industries Corp (TICO) highlighted in our Q2 report. This remains one of the key areas of engagement in the portfolio where we continue to advocate on behalf of our investors.

While these two are more active examples, our engagement most often takes the form of a two-way dialogue to better understand how management thinks about core ‘ESG’ topics and how these impact the long-term valuation and sustainability of a business. Some of our longer-held companies proactively ask us for our opinion on these issues, reflecting the value they place on our input as a long-term investor. Wise, highlighted as an example of the importance of exercising judgement in voting, is one such example.

Going forward, we will seek to highlight more of the businesses that are quietly doing the right thing for shareholders, which are sometimes overlooked, in these reports.

Please do let us know if you have any questions on anything shared in this report.