Ashoka WhiteOak Emerging Markets Trust (LSE:AWEM) — Investor Presentation

0:14 Q and a tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to Hiran Dasani. Hiran, good morning, sir. Thank you, Jack. Can you guys hear me clearly?

0:47 Yes, sir. We can. Thank you. Very happy to be here today. Thank you for all the all the investors and all the participants to be on the call. The way I would structure today's presentation is that I would speak for about thirty to thirty five minutes possibly and then we'll open it up for questions and answers. And what I would want to cover today is introduction about the WHITEOKA, introduction about our emerging market trust, the philosophy and the process with which we invest. Then we'll talk a little bit about the portfolio composition, the performance so far, and maybe a minute or two on the broader emerging market outlook, and then we'll open it up for the questions and answers.

1:41 So with that, without further ado, let me let me just kick off. Introduction to the WHITEOKA. First of all, the WHITEOKA, as you guys know, is boutique which is now eight year old. Have about $11,000,000,000 of assets including onshore India mutual fund business and the global businesses. The emerging market strategy which we are going to talk about today is now more than three year old. Prashant is the founder of the WHITEOKA. He started this firm in 2017. Prashant and I had worked together for a long period of time at Goldman before he left to start WHITEOKA. And I was I was I continued to be with Goldman Sachs Asset Management till very recently and joined about three months ago as the Chief Investment Officer to drive this platform forward along with Prashant and the great team which has already been assembled.

2:41 So that's a very quick introduction about WHITEOKA and moving on from there, we will just talk a little bit about how do we invest, how do how do we we generate alpha. And it is, you know, quite clear that alpha generation for, you know, any team happens more on the back of four things. The first is the team. The first is the philosophy. The other is the portfolio construction approach, investment process and the

3:22 team. I mean there has to be a great combination of all the four which can generate the sustainable performance. So we have a very bottom up stock picking driven philosophy. We want to buy sound businesses. We want to buy great businesses at a substantial discount to intrinsic value. We want to be focusing on micro and not focusing on the macro. So we don't think we have any edge in predicting the macro variables. But yes, we do have definite edge in stock selection focusing on the finding the great business. So that is what we spend all our energy and time on. Obviously, you can do that if you have a great team. And we'll speak a little bit more about the team just in a minute. But we have a team of sector experts which has the global experience And the investment process, it's a very collaborative process.

4:19 The analyst and the portfolio manager both are equal owners in that process and every position is jointly determined by the investment manager and the stock and the analyst. And finally we are trying to create a balanced portfolio which can generate alpha in different market environments. So we believe the combination of the great team following the time tested bottom up stock picking philosophy, doing an investment process which is collaborative between the portfolio manager and the analyst, and constricting a balanced portfolio. All this together has generated great alpha so far and we are confident of doing the same on a going forward basis as well.

5:06 Moving on from there to a little bit about the team. The team consists of more than 50 individuals at this point of time. Very proud to say that between Prashant and I, we have more than fifteen years of portfolio management investment experience in emerging markets. Prashant did that at Goldman Sachs from 2013 to '17, managing the EM strategy, and then he launched the EM strategy here at WHITEOKA in 2022. I continued to manage the EM portfolios for Goldman from 2017 to 2025 and now obviously doing at WHITEOKA along with Prashant. But more than two of us, the most important is the sector experts which we have on the team.

5:54 And the sector experts are based at three different locations. We have team at Singapore, Madrid and Mumbai. And we have people with multiple, you know, multiple diversity in multiple languages, multiple ethnicity, and you know, this team of sector experts allow us to cover a wide number of names across multiple geographies. So we are very proud of the fact that we have one of the largest investment teams among the emerging market investment managers. Certainly for the size and scale at which we are today, we are far more over indexing in terms of the, you know, the quality of the team which we have built. And we will continue to build the team as we go along and we will continue to hire as and when there is a requirement.

6:51 So there are sector experts which have been investing in markets like China, India, Taiwan, Korea, the bigger markets of emerging markets, Latin America, we have sector experts like Fadrik and Jorge. Nouri, who has been our tech expert, has been investing in Taiwan for a long period of time. Lung has been investing in industrial companies and technology companies in Asia for a long period of time. And obviously India is our home ground where we have a lot of strength in terms of bottom of stock picking across multiple sectors. So one of the strongest teams, one of the most experienced teams, I would say. We also have some very unique individuals in the team which do what we call the forensic accounting.

7:42 So for every company where we have some question mark in terms of accounting practices, where we have some question mark regarding the management governance practices. We ask Aman and his team to run more detailed forensic accounting. And this is the team also which is responsible for all the ESG related analysis for the portfolio companies. So obviously this team is which we are very proud of and is something which is going to lead to generate a lot of alpha on a going forward basis. Moving on from there to the philosophy. The investment philosophy is a very simple philosophy that outside returns can be earned over time by investing in great businesses at attractive valuations.

8:33 And there are three attributes of the business which we are looking at. The first attribute is that the business should have superior return on incremental capital. The second is that it should be a scalable long term opportunity. And the third is that the business should have the strong execution and the governance. We are looking for consciously the businesses which characterizes all this, has the characteristics of high ROIC growth and strong execution. I'll give you few examples of what type of businesses you will find in this ASHOKA EMERGING MARKETS TRUST. We like stock exchanges, for example. Stock exchanges are great regulated monopoly.

9:23 And if you want to invest in any emerging market, you have to invest through stock exchanges. They also play a lot on financialization and improving penetration of financial services in many of the emerging markets. So we own variety of stock exchanges in our portfolio. The other type of business is, let's say, the e commerce monopolies or companies in the e commerce where which have developed you know very strong competitive positioning. So for example Mercado Libre in Latin America, Eternal or earlier known as Zomato in the case of India. The food delivery business in India for example is a duopoly business and the fact that there is a lot of under penetration of food delivery in India. For example, Meituan in China delivers 50,000,000 orders every day. Zomato, the food delivery leader in India delivers about 2,000,000 orders every day. And that gives you a lot of runway for growth in food delivery.

10:29 But along with that, if you couple the duopoly nature of the business, it allows the business to generate significantly higher returns on capital. And those type of businesses which we like MercadoLibre in Latin America for example, very strong positioning in e commerce. There are very few companies which have been successfully able to compete with Amazon and MercadoLibre is one of them. And they have defended and grown their market share in the Latin America in the e commerce space. Again, e commerce penetration in Latin America is still in the high single digit compared to let's say 30 plus percent in China. So there is a long runway of growth and there is a very strong competitive positioning which the business has. So we like businesses which has those competitive characteristics and obviously they need to be run with great quality management for us to be excited about.

11:28 What generally we are skeptical of or what kind of businesses we are underweight is you know, the state owned enterprises type of businesses. So there is always a conflict of interest between the majority shareholder and the minority shareholders in a state owned enterprise because the priorities of the state are different. And we generally tend to be more skeptical of state owned enterprises which also lead us to be somewhat underweight on sectors which are dominated by SOEs such as energy, utilities and commodities in some countries. So those are the areas where we generally tend to find less alpha generating opportunities because of the dominance of the state owned enterprises.

12:16 We have a very unique valuation framework to evaluate all of these companies. I'll not go into great detail but it's a very unique opco finco framework where we analytically kind of you know bifurcate every company into an operating company and the finance company. And the finance company owns all the assets, working capital, fixed assets, all of that. And you know, we obviously the way we analyze that this finance company should generate should generate the returns which is only equivalent to the cost of capital and the operating company is where the excess ROIC is kind of valued. So what we are trying to look for here is that what is the value of the excess ROIC over the cost of capital which the business is generating and you know how long and what can be the growth of this excess ROIC over the cost of capital that the business is generating is what we are interested in valuing it.

13:25 Think of you know business like Walmart or any large retail business where you can think of Walmart as an operating company and a company which owns all the real estate. Or think of Coca Cola, a company which has all the brand related business and and the bottling business of Coca Cola which is very asset heavy business. So so we analytically bifurcate each company into Opco and Finco and and that's a very unique way of valuing it. Happy to go into more detail in the questions and answers if somebody has interest on that. This valuation framework and in the bottom up stock picking philosophy leads to an investment process which starts with a very wide universe of anything which is more than 300,000,000 market cap at the beginning. And there are more than 4,000 companies in the EM universe which we evaluate.

14:25 And the team obviously does a lot of screening at the initial level based on the governance, based on the business characteristics, structural changes. If there is a disruption in the business, then obviously we want to avoid that. And then the team would develop detailed financial models on about 600 to seven fifty companies which we think are great businesses to own. These companies would be analyzed in detail. There will be an ongoing discussion between the analyst and the portfolio manager on this and from them we will finally create a portfolio of about 125 to two fifty names which are most attractively valued at that point of time.

15:10 And that's how we kind of create a portfolio by doing intense research with the analyst and the portfolio manager and jointly kind of owning each of the position. What we type of... I mean what we like to avoid is the forms of misgovernance. And there are variety of misgovernance. It can range from poor accounting practices to all the way to let's say outright cheating of investors or outright cheating of the existing partners. And obviously we try to completely avoid the companies which are indulged in the behavior which is more egregious of cheating investors in terms of stock price manipulation and talking of prospects ahead of the insider sales and all that. So those kind of behaviors we tend to be extremely skeptical of and we would want to avoid those companies.

16:11 On companies which exhibit poor accounting practices or maybe aggressive accounting practices, we would need much higher upside to evaluate some of them. And these are obviously red flags which will prompt us to do more detailed work. But suffice it to say that there is a clear bias towards highly governed companies which is very well, I mean which is always important but even more important in the emerging markets. And in terms of the opportunity set, in terms of portfolio construction, you know we are trying to create a balanced portfolio which can generate outperformance in different market environment. So in the portfolio there will always be you know some high beta companies or more cyclical companies which will do very well when the market is doing well. There will be some companies which are kind of low beta or counter cyclical companies which will tend to do better when the markets are falling.

17:11 But in an ideal nirvana state, if we can create a portfolio which can generate alpha in both upmarket and downmarket with equal consistency, is what we are trying to achieve. And the way to achieve that is to focus on stock selection rather than taking any non stock specific bets. So we try to minimize the risk which is coming from the non stock specific factors. So you don't want to be too overweight on a single country. You don't want to be overweight on a single sector. You don't want to be too overweight on a single name. You don't want to be driving your performance because of being overweight just on growth or value or dividend yield or any such factor.

17:57 We try to minimize the non stock specific risk and try to focus the energy on the stock selection. So clearly the quantum of alpha or the magnitude of alpha which the team has generated is a function of the stock selection and the consistency of alpha or the lower volatility of alpha is more of a function of this balanced portfolio construction approach. This is a little bit about the portfolio construction approach. Where do we find the opportunities? Usually we find much more opportunities in the less efficient segments of the market. So we are always going to be somewhat overweight on mid and small cap segments of the market which in our view are less efficient segments of the market.

18:50 And generally our belief is that, you know mid and small cap are less efficient. That's why we have more alpha generating opportunities. We are not taking a view that mid and small caps will always outperform compared to the large cap. We are not even taking a view that over three to five years mid and small caps will deliver better returns. That's why we should be there. We are simply taking a view that mid and small cap are less efficient segments of the market. And that's where if we do our job well as a bottom up active portfolio managers who understand these companies well, then we should be able to generate more alpha on a per unit of capital which we deploy in this segment of the mid and small cap. So that's the that's the kind of opportunity funnel for us from a market cap perspective.

19:39 The other way to think about this opportunity funnel is that you know we are always going to be overweight on sectors or countries which are let's say more democratic countries and sectors which are less regulated sectors. So if there is a lot of government involvement in the running of the business,

20:05 it leads to less predictability of the policies and less predictable outcomes for the businesses. Similarly, in terms of countries, if there is a democracy in the country where the property rights are respected very well, then there is more predictability of the policies and it provides like an equal playing ground for every investor because everybody knows exactly what's the policy, everybody knows exactly what's the kind of roadmap from there on. So access to the government, access to the you know incumbent political party of the day, it does not provide you any unfair advantage And we think that it creates more alpha generating opportunities in sectors which are less regulated in more democratic countries. And that's where we generally tend to be more, we generally tend to be finding more alpha generating opportunities which are in sectors which are less dominated by the government related businesses.

21:10 So that is another vector on which you would find the ideas in the portfolio in terms of democracy and the the SOE type of businesses where there is a clear shift or clear overweight on the more democratic countries and there is a clear overweight on the less SOE type of businesses.

21:35 Under what circumstances will underperform? I think every portfolio manager will tell you we are great but everyone should know very well when we will underperform. And there are few environments where we will underperform. So when the poor governance segment of the market in aggregate does very well, that is a headwind for us because we generally tend to be overweight on the governance as a factor. And when poor governance segment of the market does very well, that is the headwind and will underperform in that market. Or when sectors such as, you know, commodity sectors such as commodity and the other similar sectors are doing very well. That's the other time when we'll underperform.

22:25 Government owned companies, when they do very well, that is the time when we'll underperform. Large caps outperform small and mid caps, that is the time we'll underperform. So yeah, these are some of the environment in which we will underperform. Moving on from there to the overview about the trust. Just let me take a pause and see if my voice is coming here. Jake, can you you just... Yes. We can still hear you, sir. Okay. Sure. Let's let's continue in that case. The trust has the market cap of about 58,000,000 GBP at this point of time.

23:22 The most important point which I want to highlight about is that there is no annual management fee. It's completely driven by the performance fee. So if we generate alpha, then only we get charged about this and we get paid in terms of the management fee. If we don't generate alpha, then we don't get paid any management fee and it's a very unique structure which aligns us very clearly

23:47 with the investor interest. There is an annual redemption facility each December and investors have the ability to redeem at the NAV and that annual redemption facility allows us to, it allows basically the TRUST NAV to trade very close to the pre, very close, I mean, it allows the TRUST on a daily basis to trade at a very close to the NAV price and as you can see the NAV premium or discount has been has been very moderate over the years since the inception with most of the time the trust is trading at a at a very slight premium. And the final point I would make about the characteristic of the trust is that obviously it's an emerging market trust investing in the listed equities.

24:36 But we do have the ability to invest in the pre IPO level as well. We are active participants in the IPO at the anchor investing level and there is an ability to generate alpha through investing in the pre IPOs as well at the trust level, which makes it somewhat unique compared to the other products out there in the marketplace. So that's a quick introduction about the trust. I'll move on from here to the portfolio composition and you can see that the portfolio is a very balanced portfolio which we have and the sector over weights, under weights are within a particular range.

25:22 If you look at from a market cap perspective, yes, we have about 63% weight in the large cap and about 30 five-thirty 6% weight in the SMID cap. So meaningful overweight compared to the benchmark on the SMID cap segment. In terms of sectors, you can see that sectors such as energy, utilities, which are more dominated by state owned enterprises, we have a substantial underweight position. And the largest sector by absolute weight is information technology. Here is where you will have some of the large cap names like TSMC, Samsung Electronics, SK HENX and so on and so forth. Consumer is one area where we are generally finding a lot of opportunities. Consumer discretionary is a very very diversified sector within itself. So overall at an aggregate level you might see a bigger overweight on consumer discretionary but within that there are multiple sub sectors like internet businesses, auto businesses, retailing type of businesses and so on and so forth. And then diversification makes consumer discretionary quite unique in that sense.

26:30 So this is the kind of you know portfolio composition at this point of time. From a country allocation perspective, as you can see, we are showing here two things. One is the country of listing and the other is country of economic exposure. What I would focus more on is the country of economic exposure. And from a country of economic exposure perspective, we are trying to minimize the overweight and underweight compared to the benchmark within a particular range. So we try to find alpha generating opportunities in almost every large country and almost every meaningful country within the emerging market. We have about 1% underweight on China. We have a substantial overweight on India, partly because of the, you know, the strong team, which has and also the kind of you know, long track record of investing in India, which is one of the highest alpha contributor.

27:32 So India small cap is a very alpha rich segment of the market and and we believe that over time that expertise which we have is going to deliver substantial alpha on a per unit of capital and that's that's the kind of reason to be overweight on India. It's not a macro call on India. It's more about where we are finding more alpha generating opportunities. And similarly you know some of the less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, we have less opportunities at this point of time and we are kind of underweight on that. But by and large, we are not taking a big macro call or big top down call on any particular country and we are trying to create a balanced portfolio, using the portfolio construction approach which I outlined earlier.

28:23 From a democracy score perspective, you know obviously we are more overweight on countries which are more democratic and we have less weight in the countries which are kind of less democratic. From an SOE versus non SOE cut, if you think about it, the portfolio has a significant bias towards owning non SOE type of companies, non state owned enterprises and the countries which have high concentration of the state owned enterprises like China, Saudi Arabia, you can see that there is a substantial underweight on the state owned enterprises in those countries. I'm going to move a little bit quickly in terms of the overall portfolio characteristics just before we talk about the performance.

29:11 So we have about two thirteen holdings at this point of time. As you can see the portfolio generates significantly high return on equity compared to the benchmark. On a price to earnings which is more conventional metric our portfolio would look more expensive compared to the benchmark. But when you look at it through the free cash flow metric, the OpCo FinCo framework which I described earlier, from that metric our valuation multiples are fairly close to the benchmark. And the reason for that is that the conversion of earnings or the reported earnings into the free cash flow is much lower at the benchmark level. Because we are consciously looking for businesses which generates high amount of free cash flow, that's where our portfolio companies tend to have a much better conversion at an aggregate level.

30:03 And yeah the portfolio is running with a beta of very close to one, zero point nine seven and sixty five type of active share. So that's broadly about the kind of portfolio. Very quickly, you know few things about the performance. Very strong performance since the inception. So the portfolio has delivered eight forty basis points of cumulative alpha, two sixty basis points of annualized alpha since inception, which is a very strong performance. And as you can see in the subsequent slides, the performance has come largely from the stock selection. The large cap has also delivered performance but a large contribution has come from the mid and small cap segments of the market. So about 34% of the allocation to the mid and small cap has delivered roughly two third or more than two third of the total alpha. So that's what gives us the confidence that the mid and small cap are far less efficient and on a per unit of capital we can generate significantly more alpha from the mid and small cap segments of the market.

31:20 We also look at the performance from a sector or the industry versus I mean country versus country versus stock selection. There are a lot of numbers on this slide but the key message I want to leave you with is that almost entire alpha generation since inception has come from the stock selection. And the allocation effect, the country allocation effect has been very very minimal. And if we are truly the stock pickers which we are claiming to be, then our alpha generation also should come largely from stock selection and the performance obviously speaks to that effect very very clearly. From a from a from a sec number from of you know from from which companies have delivered alpha for us just few examples like TSMC has been one of the kind of strongest alpha generating companies. There are some very unique small cap companies from India. DOMS Industries, this is a stationary maker from India, has gone up 195%.

32:32 SK Hynix obviously is a large memory name from Korea that has delivered a lot of alpha for us over the years. Alibaba is one of the other well known names. Again Senko Gold is a very small cap gold jeweler jewelry retailer in India and that has also been one of the top contributors since inception. So the point I'm trying to make is that there are some very unique mid and small cap names which you'll usually not find in many of the other portfolios and that kind of speaks a lot about the strength of the team in terms of finding the ideas in that space. So that's broadly about the performance attribution.

33:19 And maybe I'll just, you know, spend one or two minutes on the EM before we can open before we open it up for the questions and answers. Obviously, you know, EM, our faster growing markets in the world, emerging markets, you know, are at about 40% of the world GDP at this point of time and their share is likely to continue to go up. The millennials or the younger population is largely in the emerging market. So a large proportion of the workforce addition globally is going to come from the emerging market. And in general, the growth is going to be faster in the emerging market as we go forward. And from a valuation perspective, emerging markets continue to trade at significant discount to the global markets.

34:14 And the discount to the MSCI World is close to 30% on a price to earnings basis, close to 40% on a price to book basis. And you know, even after a very strong year of return, there is a still reasonable valuation for the emerging markets. And lastly, the earnings growth, you know, if you look at from a longer term perspective, right, share of GDP and share of global indices for the emerging market is is still significantly under representation there.

35:00 So so there is about you know 40% of the share of global GDP but there is only 10% weight in the in the global indices like MSCI All Country World Index. So that tells you that how the the underperformance over the last ten years has has made emerging markets even more attractive from an asset class perspective, from a from a longer term perspective. So, having said that, we obviously don't want you to invest, because we are pitching you the emerging market. We want you to invest whatever your emerging market allocation with this fund because we have the great alpha generating capabilities is how we would want to position ourselves. Let me stop here and maybe it would be a good time to, you know, go into questions and answers.

35:49 Perfect, Heron. That's great. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab that's situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just while, Huron takes a few moments just to review those questions that have been submitted already, just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can all be accessed via your investor dashboards. Herein, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning. And thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But herein at this point, sir, if I may hand over to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end that would be great. Thank you. Thank you Jake. So yeah the first question is that with the top 10 holdings accounting for 31% of NAV how does this concentration align with your maximum risk budget constraints?

36:43 And do you anticipate moving forward higher or lower concentration in 2026? I think I think this is a this is an interesting way to look at it. I'll probably bring it back to you know the how how the benchmark is also concentrated. And yeah so if you look at the you look at the number of holdings we have two thirteen holdings and in the benchmark there are about eleven eighty nine holdings. Now the thing is that the some of the large cap names like TSMC has close to 10% weight in the benchmark Tencent, Alibaba, Samsung, Hynix those are the other kind of four names which are the which are the large names in the benchmark.

37:32 Now the way we think about the position sizing the first and foremost every position sizing should be function of how much alpha you are able to generate from that. So what is the fundamental upside which we have from a particular name? The second question we ask ourselves is that what is the risk associated with that upside? The third question which we ask is that what is the market cap and liquidity? And the fourth question we ask ourselves on the position sizing is that by adding this position, am I reducing the non stock specific risk or am I adding to the non stock specific risk. So every position size is a function of how much absolute returns or alpha potential we have, what is the kind of risk associated with that, market cap, liquidity and the the contribution to the overall portfolio construction.

38:31 So we we kind of find more and more alpha generating opportunities in the mid and small cap, obviously the portfolio is going to be fairly well diversified. Rather than absolute weight, I would also focus more on the active weights. And we are not, you know, are not taking a very large active weight single kind of a single stock basis. I will just show you this slide. Yeah, so the largest active weights are at about 1.9% on a single name. So although TSMC may look very large from an absolute weight perspective but it is also very large cap weight in the benchmark. Samsung electronics 4% weight but it's also like a 3.630.7% weight on the benchmark.

39:21 So at a single stock level we are not taking a very large active bet. So we are not betting the house on let's say one or two single name. And that's where I think we are not too worried about the overall concentration among some of the larger cap names as was the question. Next question is about what are some of the larger portfolio decisions that have been made over the year. Can you speak about some names you have bought and sold? Okay. So, so yeah, I mean obviously portfolio positions generally our our holding period is about three year plus, okay? And there are there are many names in the broader emerging market strategy or in the India strategy which WHITEOKA has a long term track record. We have been owning for a long period of time.

40:19 You know, so this year obviously we have increased some of the exposure in the technology related value chain in Taiwan. So you know companies like Delta Electronics, we have kind of added our positions early in the year. Companies like in China, we have added to, you know, names like Alibaba earlier in the year. We also found some very interesting, you know, small cap opportunities in the gold mining space in the developed markets. So we have added some of the gold miners in Canada and Australia. The portfolio does have the ability to invest outside of the outside of the emerging market for, if, if the, if the businesses are generating significant value from the emerging markets. So, we have some positions in the developed market.

41:14 And, especially for a commodity name like gold mining or copper mining, we have taken a view that rather than owning an emerging market company, would kind of own, you know, more of developed market exposures which are relatively having much better governance for those companies. So yeah, we have kind of, you know, added exposure to some of the miners earlier in the year. We have added exposure to some of the semiconductor related businesses. Recently we also added a Korean company called This is the owner of the most popular k pop band BTS.

42:02 Now I'm sure everyone is familiar with BTS. They top the billboard charts and all that. And we believe k pop as a trend is only increasing in its popularity. And this is a very unique business because, you know, they kind of nurture these bands for long period of time. And it's almost like a factory when you are managing the artists year after year and you you keep coming out with the new new bands and the new all buffs and it's very interesting kind of business to look at. So yeah we keep we keep finding opportunities in the in the consumer, in the internet space, in the in the technology space, in the healthcare space, and so on and so forth.

42:50 In China, for example, we have added Wuxi XDC. Wuxi XDC is the company which is involved in the, you know, contract research and contract development of the pharmaceutical molecules and the most advanced ADC type of molecules. And this is one of the very specialized CDMO type of businesses which which is out there with very unique capabilities and and that's the

43:18 company which we owned earlier this year. So so yeah I mean we we we are active but obviously the average holding period of the names generally tend to be about three years for us. Okay so then the next question is do you anticipate maintaining or adjusting exposure to the underperformers particularly those in China or Hong Kong? In general, know there is no loss type of fixed limit which we have. Obviously underperformance of every name is reviewed periodically and we try to understand what is the cause of the underperformance.

44:06 Is it something related to the execution of the management? Is it something related to our investment thesis not working out because our understanding was wrong earlier and our understanding has developed over the years?

44:23 Is it something to do with the macro parameters not playing out? So obviously we keep analyzing that and periodically we do review the underperforming companies and we are very happy to move out if there is a thesis change. If the thesis is not working out based on what you bought for initially or if there is a kind of you know management execution which is not playing out as per your expectations, then we are very happy to move out. But there is no kind of, you know, fixed kind of stop loss limit or there is no set rule that at a certain underperformance we will cut. So every fifteen-twenty percent underperformance compared to the benchmark usually prompts us to, you know, re underwrite that thesis. And after the re underwriting, we may decide to add, we may decide to sell out, or or we may decide to trim the position sometimes. Sometimes you feel that is a great business you want to own from a longer term perspective. But in the near term there are some headwinds and you may want to keep a smaller position to manage the risk and be ready with you know adding some of the incremental positions.

45:45 So just very recently we're discussing about something like BYD in China. This is the largest automaker. We used to own a much bigger position but because of the competitive intensity rising in China we have cut down meaningfully our position and it's a small position today. It's an underweight compared to the benchmark. But we are discussing what will be the right time to you know buy this company again because competition is high but this is a clearly a market leader and it continues to do extremely well compared to every other electric weekly companies out there. So at an appropriate valuation you might just want to re engage with that again. So with every name there will be different outcome but yes, will always be a periodic review of every position whether it is whether it is underperforming or not. So that is the kind of last question I am seeing here on the chat box.

46:52 Abba? Absolutely. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time and addressing all of those questions that came in, from investors this morning. And, of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. But here and perhaps before really now, just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great. Yeah. So I think I would just close by saying that, you know, what you will get by investing in the ASHOKA Emerging Market Trust is combination of strong stock selection driven alpha.

47:38 And we have some unique capabilities in investing in the mid and small cap segments of the market, which has delivered great alpha over that period of time. What you will not get is a lot of, you know, SOE type of exposure and what you will not get is, I mean, not you'll not get exposure to poorly governed companies. So we are very focused on governance. We are very focused on the execution capabilities of the management. And our our our our attempt and our promise is to deliver alpha through stock selection over a period of time across multiple emerging markets, focusing more specifically on the mid and small cap segments of the market. So, that's that's broadly the, what we get by investing in this this trust.

48:31 Perfect, herein. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of management team of the ASHOKA WHITEOKA WHITEOKA WHITEOKA WHITEOKA WHITEOKA

48:57 That now concludes today's session. So good morning to you all.