Artemis Leading Consumer Brands

Artemis Leading Consumer Brands is a flexible global thematic fund that seeks to capture the emerging middle class’s consumption of luxury brands. It is a bottom-up, high-conviction fund that leverages the team’s experience and deep knowledge of the consumer sectors. 

Our opinion

We believe that this fund is in very capable hands under Swetha and the rest of her team. The benchmark-agnostic, unconstrained nature of the fund gives the team the freedom to be nimble and take advantage of the best opportunities they see across different luxury brands.

Fund manager

Swetha Ramachandran is the lead manager of this new fund. She joined Artemis from GAM in September 2023 where she was manager of the GAM Luxury Brands Fund from 2019 to August 2023. Prior to joining GAM in 2012 as an analyst on the firm’s European strategies, she was a consumer analyst in the growth equities asset management arm of Alliance Bernstein, and before that an analyst at Credit Suisse and ESG ratings agency Vigeo. She began her career as an Asian equity analyst at Goldman Sachs in Singapore. Swetha holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science; a Magistère in French from the Sorbonne and has completed the CFA Institute Certificate in ESG Investing.

Swetha RamachandranFund manager

Investment process

By investing in leading consumer brands, this strategy endeavours to capitalize on the emerging middle class's spending potential and evolving consumer demand trends. The focus is on identifying companies with robust brand strength which helps create barriers to entry and gives them pricing power. This results in high profit margins, which should enable investors to benefit from long-term compounding earnings growth.

The investment process starts by identifying premium global consumer brands exposed to resilient, mass-affluent consumers in various industries such as fashion, cosmetics, watches, jewellery, leisure, cars, fine wines and spirits and others. They mainly restrict themselves to the consumer staples and consumer discretionary subsectors however they will occasionally find opportunities in the consumer-facing healthcare companies. They will only invest and hold stocks where the intrinsic valuation suggests a minimum 15% share price upside or 50% compounded over 3 years. The final portfolio is high conviction, holding between 25-35 companies.

ESG

ESG - Integrated  

The fund is an Article 8 fund and emphasizes its commitment to ESG considerations. The team excludes investments in companies generating more than 5-10% of revenues from specific industries such as weapons, gambling, tobacco, thermal coal, and oil & gas. They have a list of 50 ESG data points that they assess for all companies that help feed into their fundamental analysis of the company’s valuation. They also actively engage with companies, supported by their in-house Stewardship team to improve their ESG practices. 

Risk

Portfolio guidelines and restrictions are embedded into Artemis' in-house order management system: Charles River. In addition to this, the Operations Oversight & Control team at Artemis monitors end-of-day checks to ensure compliance with relevant investment restrictions. The Investment Committee has overall responsibility for oversight of Artemis' investment activities. They review the performance and activity of fund managers; regulatory and/or client-stipulated constraints and guidelines.

The fund is unconstrained in nature and driven by bottom-up stock selection. As a result, the fund will differ from the index and is managed in a benchmark-agnostic manner.

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