Company Reports

Before the pandemic, United Airline's strategy focused on cutting costs to expand margins, which averaged 10.6% between 2015 and 2019. In 2021-22, United announced a series of aircraft orders for up to 200 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and 500 narrow-body aircraft to join its fleet by 2032. The strategy is to replace less-efficient and smaller jets to radically increase the average number of seats United can sell on an average flight, with more premium seats and legroom for those willing to pay up, and plenty of cheap seats that the company can sell to more leisurely travelers and compete with lower-cost airlines on many of its routes.

A pioneer in diabetes care, Novo Nordisk has been in the business for over 85 years. It claims 30% of the $100 billion diabetes treatment market and roughly half of the more than $15 billion insulin market. Diabetes' prevalence is expected to soar in the coming decades as a result of an increasingly overweight and aging population, and we expect Novo to maintain its wide moat as it continues to innovate in both diabetes and obesity therapies.

As recently as 2016, Swedish Orphan Biovitrum, or Sobi, was primarily a specialty pharmaceutical firm focused on in-licensing and commercializing therapies in Europe. Since then, successful launches of hemophilia treatments Elocta and Alprolix, along with a series of acquisitions and partnerships, have expanded Sobi's geographic reach into the US and broadened its presence across hematology and immunology.

In recent years, Travelers' diversified model resulted in mixed results. However, with property-casualty insurance insurers now seeing tailwinds across the industry, the company is generating very strong returns.

Alcoa is a vertically integrated aluminum company with bauxite mining, alumina refining, and primary aluminum smelting operations. Key end markets include transportation, building and construction, and packaging.

After having navigated the challenges as a smaller, emerging competitor to break into therapeutic markets that are dominated by larger competitors, Penumbra is now set to be acquired by Boston Scientific by end of 2026. By focusing on creating innovative devices for use in endovascular systems to address blood clots and aneurysms, over the last 20 years Penumbra has carved out a small but growing presence and competes directly with Stryker, Medtronic, and Terumo globally.

Scor is a large reinsurance company headquartered in Paris. It operates in over 100 countries, serving many clients from offices worldwide that are connected through a backbone network of application, data, and exchange systems. This allows local access to centralized risk analysis, underwriting, and pricing databases, at the same time allowing information on local market conditions to be shared among the group’s worldwide offices. In addition, through regular exchanges of personnel between group headquarters in Paris and its non-French subsidiaries and branch offices, the business encourages professional development and training across its various lines and geographies. We think that historically in the case of Scor, investments in risk analysis, underwriting, and pricing haven’t benefited the overall business as returns on equity have been low. Our general sense is that is changing.

Partners Group has built a private markets platform around client solutions rather than fund sales. About 37% of its assets under management sit in bespoke mandates for large institutions. A further 30% is in semiliquid evergreen funds for wealthy and smaller investors. For both groups, the firm spans private equity, credit, real estate, infrastructure, and royalties.

Ageas would do well to take a leaf out of other midsize European multiline books by clearing up its financial statements and concentrating on core markets. Ageas has strength in its domestic market, Belgium, evolving to be the market leader, and is a dominant force in long-term savings. Its strategy in this line is to continue with the ongoing shift to unit-linked products that are lower margin but capital-light. This is probably one of the reasons behind the company’s gradual improvement in ROEs. Investments have played a part in improving customer service and protection that can be sold with savings products, and this creates a stickier set of customers and products. These investments have oriented around improving standards of underwriting, and despite raising expenses, the net effect in nonlife insurance has been positive. Ageas has a leading health insurance business with expenditure on health in Belgium being one of the highest in Europe. The firm targets price stability and ambulatory care services.

Acuity is a leading industrial technology company offering lighting, lighting controls, and intelligent building solutions. It has two reportable segments: Acuity Brands Lighting and Acuity Intelligent Spaces.

Sandvik enjoys strong market positions in niche mining equipment and premium metal-cutting tools. Sandvik has established a more resilient and profitable business than its past, via a continuous focus on improving operational efficiency, divestments and a large share of aftermarket sales and servicing throughout the life of its mining equipment. Despite this, the short-cycle nature of demand for its products, most notably in its machining segment, exposes the group to cyclical swings in demand and leads to regular restructuring programs to protect profitability through the cycle.

Getinge is a Swedish medical technology firm that specializes in operating room equipment, critical-care technologies, and sterilization solutions for hospitals and biopharmaceutical manufacturers. Over the past decade, the company has faced significant regulatory scrutiny, including a 2015 US consent decree, product liability settlements related to surgical mesh, multiple product recalls, and recent US Food and Drug Administration letters regarding its Cardiosave and Cardiohelp cardiovascular devices. These challenges required increased investment in quality systems and product remediation, which has persistently put pressure on margins. With the recent FDA submission for Cardiosave, we hope Getinge can soon leave this chapter behind.

We intend to drop coverage of Accent on or around Aug. 14, 2026. We provide analyst research and ratings on over 1,600 companies globally, and periodically adjust our coverage according to investor interest and staffing.

Netflix is the leading subscription streaming television platform globally and enjoys the economic benefits of this scale. We expect this position to persist. Netflix did not need Warner Bros., and at the price to which it agreed, we thought it would be value-destructive. However, we do think it needs to move beyond its core business of selling Netflix subscriptions if it wants to reaccelerate growth.

In April 2024, GE Aerospace emerged from the former GE conglomerate as a formidable and focused global turbine engine producer, powering about three of every four commercial airline flights on Earth.

While the pandemic caused some of Abbott's segments to balloon (diagnostics) and others to fall short (medical devices), conditions have largely normalized and Abbott's prospects will again rely heavily on its ability to consistently introduce innovative products across divisions. On margins, we're pleased to see the company make steady progress over the last decade.

Axon’s suite of hardware and software plays a critical role in the technological backbone of modern law enforcement agencies. For decades, the Taser saw little commercial success, held down by immense legal pushback and regulatory barriers. Axon’s founder, Patrick Smith, improved upon the flawed technology and eventually brought the TASER to commercial success. Axon needed proof that TASERs weren’t the primary cause of death in most police encounters, so in 2009 it introduced the police body-worn camera and a cloud-hosted repository, Evidence.com, to record incidents and store untampered video and audio evidence.

Delivery Hero is an online food and convenience delivery platform with operations in over 70 countries. The firm has market share leadership in several regions with attractive growth prospects. However, defending its positioning will become more difficult as competition intensifies and markets mature.

U.S. Bancorp is the largest nonglobal systemically important bank in the US and has been one of the most profitable regional banks we cover. Though some of its peer regional banks have been catching up in terms of scale and profitability, we still like the bank's larger revenue mix from capital-light fee income.

Progressive is one of the strongest franchises in the insurance industry and has consistently generated industry-leading returns; however, it has experienced fairly dramatic volatility as the auto insurance industry has been on a rollercoaster ride since the start of the pandemic.