Good morning, everybody. I'm Matthew Masters, CEO of Caledonia Investments, and it really is my pleasure today to be able to introduce the Public Companies Spotlight. Now, this follows on from the Public Companies Spotlight that we ran in January, which is available on our website and was very well received. The purpose of these spotlights is to provide you with the opportunity to hear directly from our specialist investment team. They can explain their strategy and how it's executed, and I expect you'll hear how they benefit from being part of Caledonia as well. Telling people a bit more about Caledonia was really brought home during our recent Results Roadshow. Just before the Roadshow, the team did a business breakdowns podcast on What's Going. You'll hear more about that later on.
A few people who we visited on the Roadshow had tuned in and listened to it, and they said they found it very helpful in sort of just getting more feel and color about what we get up to at Caledonia. I expect this will be more of the same. Just moving through the discourse statement and to today's agenda. After my introduction, I'll hand it over to Alan Murran, Ben Archer, and Henry Morris, who will take you through the spotlight. This will be followed by a panel discussion, which today is being chaired by Anthony Leatham, who's the Head of Investment Companies Research at Peel Hunt, and we're very grateful for him helping out today. After that, we'll take questions from the room and online, and then we'll aim to bring the session to a close at around 12:15 P.M.
Let me give you a reminder about Caledonia. At Caledonia, we think and act differently. We are long-term stewards of our shareholders' money, including the Cayzer family, who have entrusted theirs to us for generations. This sense of responsibility shapes everything we do, including our approach to evaluating risk and reward. We do not use benchmarking in the business. Instead, we are targeting absolute returns, beating inflation by 3%-6% over the medium to longer term. This aligns us directly with shareholders who are also looking to see their investment make real progress over time. This influences the level of risk we take and are prepared to take with their capital. Over time, this approach has delivered results at the top end of our target range, and our track record also includes 58 consecutive years of increasing our dividend.
Now, the core of our investment success is simple. We make long-term investments in high-quality companies. Our maxim, "Time well invested," perfectly explains our investment purpose. It reflects our commitment to making well-considered and well-founded long-term investments and being patient and disciplined in doing so. It also applies just as importantly to how we interact with our business partners and with our colleagues at Caledonia. Now, I really think you will see how the rubber meets the proverbial road today on "Time well invested" with the Public Companies Spotlight. Last but by no means least on this slide, all the investments are made by our in-house team who are fully aligned with our shareholders. Remember, they do not manage anybody else's money. There is no fundraising, and their performance is measured against their contribution to NAV per share growth, and they are rewarded in Caledonia's shares.
Their incentives are directly tied to long-term value creation. This slide provides an overview of our investment strategy. Each member of our 24-strong investment team specializes in one of the main areas with one of the strategies shown. The strategies are in good long-term areas, and because there is no fundraising and the portfolios are concentrated and they take a long-term approach, the teams are under no pressure to invest. These ingredients combine to enable them to spend their time identifying the best opportunities to invest in at the right time. The strategies invest from Caledonia's balance sheet and have different liquidity profiles, which does provide synergies. Further, having the three different strategies provides additional benefit to shareholders of diversification. We will hear about public companies in a minute, so I will not steal their thunder.
Just a reminder on private capital, we make direct investments into well-established, profitable mid-market companies in the U.K. We tend to be the majority shareholder, and we work in partnership with management over the longer term to improve the quality of businesses and help them grow. We use prudent capital structures. What does that mean? It means we use low levels of debt, and we do not pay speculative multiples. We aim at any given time to hold between 5 and 10 companies. I'm really pleased that over the last 10 years, this portfolio has annualized at 12.4% per annum. The funds team invests behind proven private equity managers. Just under two-thirds of this area is focused on the American lower mid-market, with a balance in more growth-orientated funds in Asia.
The nature of funds investing means each fund invests in a series of different companies, and so the underlying exposure is extremely diversified with over 600 companies in that strategy. Again, very pleased that this has delivered returns of 13.3% annualized over the last 10 years. We have a central investment committee overseeing investment activity and ensure we benefit from the considerable experience and knowledge that we have around the business. That is a summary of our investment strategies, and I'll hand over to Alan.
Good morning. I'm Alan Murran, and I am Co-Head of Caledonia's Public Companies business with responsibility for the capital portfolio. Thank you all for joining us today at the Public Companies Spotlight. The team and I are excited to be doing this. Our aim today is to give you real insight into three key things. Firstly, how we invest and the depth of work that we do. Secondly, what makes our public equity strategy attractive, successful, and different from other standard equity managers. Finally, how Caledonia's permanent capital structure and special culture gives us real advantages as investors and you as shareholders. We benefit from permanent capital at Caledonia. We invest from the balance sheet, and we're not measured against a quarterly index. We're not worried about comparisons on that short basis. Instead, we focus on achieving attractive absolute returns.
Also, we don't need to raise external money or manage inflows and outflows. That gives us the ability to be long-term. This results in an important tangible difference. If you look at our portfolios, you can see that the average holding period is over seven years and growing. That's a massive difference to more standard equity managers who tend to hold for one year or less. This is only valuable if it's used well. As Ben Graham said, in the short run, the market is a voting machine, and in the long run, it's a weighing machine. What he meant by this was that in the short run, stock market prices move around a lot based upon macro or sentiment. It's quite hard to make money as it's not very predictable on a repeatable basis.
However, over the long run, the market is a weighing machine, and therefore, working out the weight or the value of a company, this is a much more repeatable process and one that we take advantage of. Now, obviously, you need to pick the right companies to weigh to make this work. We have two concentrated portfolios, typically with around 15 holdings-20 holdings. In addition, we focus on quality, and we'll define this later in more detail, but that includes pricing power, excellent capital allocation, and strong competitive position. These are the ingredients for long-term compounding. Long-term ownership gives us deep knowledge from a risk management perspective. We think about how companies are impacted by cycles. When I look at cycles, I think about things including management changes, CapEx cycles, macro shocks.
We look not only at how these impact the numbers of a company, but also the behaviors at the company. As we do management meetings, we track it, and we can see as a consequence what they say and whether they do what they say they're going to do. Having this type of knowledge means that we can act decisively when the stock market falls sharply and bargains are available. This is a really great way for us to contribute to Caledonia's NAV returns and also increases the margin of safety within our portfolio. A recent example of this was during the April selloff on the back of President Trump's announcements around tariffs, and we were able to top up targeted holdings and initiate a new position.
In summary, I would highlight that we are focused solely on investing and aligned with our shareholders. It's a strategy that really utilizes the permanent capital from Caledonia and the benefits of that, allowing us to build concentrated, high-quality portfolios that we hold for the long term, and that has resulted in strong performance and a very different proposition to the standard equity managers' offerings. With that, I'll hand over to my colleague Ben, who will talk more about the team and how we execute our strategy.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Ben Archer, and I Co-Head the Public Companies team at Caledonia. It is great to see so many people in the room and online, and welcome from me too. Here you have the rest of the team. You can tell from the photos we are a happy bunch. You will hear from Henry and Lucy later, and Ollie and Lucas are here too. For those of you in the room, hopefully you will have a chance to speak to them all over lunch. We have got something to be happy about because we really enjoy what we do, and we are a team that is passionate about investing. We love finding great companies. We love talking about great companies as a team, and we love investing in great companies for the long term.
Caledonia's structure is really a key enabler of that and a huge attraction for us as a team. Nearly 100% of our time is focused on investing, which is pretty unusual in the public equity space. Broader marketing responsibilities have largely been outsourced to Matt and Rob. Thank you. As I said, flows, active share, short-term noise are not things we have to worry about. A very pure focus on investing, which we think is beneficial to Caledonia shareholders too. It is also a very flat team structure, with everyone having an equal vote on a new addition or a disposal. That is underpinned by the fact that the team is rewarded on portfolio performance and not on ideas.
That helps drive a really cohesive team-based culture with constructive challenges and constructive discussion, which I think is essential when you're investing in companies for the long term like us. Lastly, we're also a very experienced team. There are over 100 years of experience between us, and the fact that over 44 of that has been spent at Caledonia, I think, is a testament to both the company and team culture. The two portfolios we manage, Capital and Income, are both global mandates to which we apply the same research methodology and operational discipline around quality, around liquidity, and around broader risk management. They are global mandates, but the majority of the portfolio companies are headquartered in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, which is where we see most of the opportunities, remembering most of the companies are global in nature.
The capital portfolio was around GBP 700 million at the end of March. It's a bit bigger today and has a target return of 10% per annum. It's an unconstrained mandate in that there is no income requirement, and it's an all-cap portfolio, albeit the majority of the holdings are skewed to larger companies where we can find liquidity to be able to act quickly when the market gives us that opportunity. Now, it's important to stress this is not an out-and-out growth portfolio, as some might assume, because we have an income portfolio too. We very much think about the risk we are taking for the return we want, and we are not investing in high risk. We are not trying to invest in super high growth in the capital portfolio in the same way we're not trying to invest in super high yield in the income portfolio.
What we're investing in is super high quality in both portfolios, with a 10%+ target for capital and a 7% + target for income that then compounds over the long term. The income portfolio is managed in exactly the same way as capital, the only difference being that it has a 3.5% yield on cost objective too. Why yield on cost and not running yield? Why would we want to sell our best ideas just as the compounding is getting interesting? That is another key differentiator for us, certainly as compared to many income funds, and aligns with our strategy of owning the best companies for the long term. This yield on cost metric was a key part of the income strategy reset that took place at the end of 2019 when we took the portfolio on as a team.
Much like we had done with the caps portfolio 10 years to 12 years ago, we repositioned it for quality. We are now seeing the benefits of that come through in terms of performance with good portfolio income growth, which is contributing to Caledonia's costs and its dividend commitment. What do we do day to day? What is the investment process? Let's start with idea generation, which firstly can come from anyone on the team and usually does. It is very much a bottom-up approach, freed up by the fact that we have no reference to indices and so no relative weightings to think about. Perhaps more instructive here is the sectors we avoid, either because we do not think they are generally high quality enough or because we do not understand them or both. An example of the former would be the bank sector.
An example of the latter might be biotech. That naturally screens out a portion of the market. The fundamental analysis includes detailed reviews of annual reports, industry data, peer analysts, and all that good work, and also includes an ESG assessment or what we term responsible investing. All in all, that work will take many, many months. Importantly, we build our own financial models. We do not rely on third parties. We take the data all the way back to pre-GFC so we can really get a sense of how a company has performed over the long term and through cycles. We also undertake a separate quality assessment and benchmarking exercise, which we are going to come to in a moment. That also includes thinking about a company's culture and whether a company will really make a strong long-term investment candidate for us.
As part of the numbers, we calculate our owner's earnings for each company each year. Owner's earnings approximates to free cash flow after maintenance CapEx, but before growth CapEx. As such, we think it's a very good reflection of the true economic earnings available to an owner like ourselves. It's that long-term growth in owner's earnings together with any yield that fundamentally underpins the long-term return assessment for a company, while also informing us more broadly about a company's economics. An investment only reaches approval stage if the whole team are happy, and then it goes to the wider Caledonia Investment Committee for further discussion. Now, assuming it's all approved, that does not typically mean we go out and buy the shares straight away. Valuation discipline is also core to our process, and we always look to have a margin of safety on purchases.
That calculation is also underpinned by our owner's earnings analysis, as well as other metrics like yield. For each company, we have a long-term owner's earnings ratings range, which together with our forecasts helps guide us to when we think the shares are good value. Henry's going to draw that out later in the investment case. This helps ensure that multiple risk is minimized and obviously returns potential enhanced. It also means that we can often have a company on our approval list for many years without actually investing. Then something like Liberation Day comes along, and we can deploy quite heavily. Portfolio construction. We believe in concentrated portfolios. Assuming you are spread across a few sectors, the benefits of diversification dissipate quite quickly beyond 15 holdings-20 holdings. Why take a portfolio above 20 holdings and therefore compromise on quality?
Better to focus on your best ideas when you get a deep understanding and then act with conviction when you have that opportunity. In terms of risk and risk management, the main risk is we get an investment wrong. However, the quality bias helps mitigate against this. From a sizing perspective, the largest holding across our total AUM as at 31st of March was PMI, just under 10% of the total holding. We would not expect to go much above that. Day-to-day risk management is focused on really checking on the investment case, kind of the progress against our investment thesis, and making sure we're happy with the sizing and the valuation of each company, as well as the overall sector exposure.
That means top-slicing overly large positions, which is mainly because they've done very well, or we think the valuation is looking a bit stretched, as well as adding to existing holdings when the market provides that opportunity. Monitoring. Our long-term investment horizon means we tend to punch well above our weight in terms of investor access. That includes both the C-suite, but also meeting regional management teams where you can get a real insight into local operations and local markets and also understand those internal relationships. We do like meeting companies outside of their reporting cycle when the management team aren't focused on the quarter or the half-year results, and we can really get a sense of how the long-term opportunity is playing out and the investment case.
All this means is that our average holding period is very long at 7.4 years across both portfolios and actually 8.4 years in capital. Given the income portfolio strategy reset 5.5 years ago, the average holding period for income is lower at 4.7 years, but still very long in the context of public equity investing. Given we generally expect to only change one or two positions a year in each portfolio, we expect both these numbers to continue to rise over time. These kind of PE-like holding periods, actually I'd say in fact longer than many PE holding periods, are a reflection of our high conviction, long-term approach, and our ability to look through cycles to ignore that short-term noise and indeed use market volatility to our advantage and then let the compounding do the work. How do we measure quality?
Let me introduce you to what we call our quality matrix. It is really the key characteristics which we think are important in assessing a company's quality. I mean, there are others around end markets and balance sheets, which we think are important too, but we have captured the majority here. By scoring each company on each metric, it not only acts as a benchmarking tool for the portfolio and the work in progress, the WIP list, but it also helps inform us and promotes debate amongst the team. Ultimately, the strength and resilience for a company's economics and owner's earnings derives from these quality metrics in our view. All our portfolio companies will score reasonably well on most of these metrics, but some are particularly strong in certain areas. We are going to try to draw out a few examples here by giving you some portfolio company examples.
Let's start with business mode or the barriers to entry and resilience, which is the company I've included here is Thermo Fisher Scientific. This is a $150 billion market cap company that leads in the life sciences, tools, and services space and has been held in the capital portfolio since 2015. Its most resilience derives from a number of key areas, but three things I would call out are, one, it's highly embedded with customers, particularly in the pharma sector. 80% of its revenues are consumables and services, providing a sticky and predictable revenue stream, which is one of the patterns we really like. Two, it is one of the biggest players in life sciences. It has the highest R&D budgets, helping them keep themselves ahead of peers.
It also means that a lot of researchers are trained on Thermo instruments, on Thermo machines, which they're typically loyal to as they go through their careers. Three, it operates in highly regulated markets where products and consumables are often specified into a process, providing a barrier to rivals. Next, owner mentality. This can be both founder-led businesses, but also management teams who truly act like owners. There are many portfolio examples we could use, but a great example is Big Yellow Group. It's a leading self-storage company and is held in the income portfolio. Unlike many REITs, which are run by third-party managers for a fee, and so you might grow AUM for the sake of growing AUM, it is still run by the founders, Nick Vetch and Jimmy Gibson, who remain decent-sized shareholders. What are the key owner's traits we would identify with Big Yellow?
First, the balance sheet is very conservative. It is a sector in a sector that is typically highly geared; they are not. This conservatism then extends to their asset base where almost all of their Big Yellow stores are freehold and the majority are based in the southeast and London, where land and supply is scarce, which also acts as their moat. Second, as owners, they are very thoughtful investors and allocators. It's their money too. They are not going to overpay on new sites. Third, their owner's culture, which is set by Nick and Jimmy and is reflecting the long-term thinking, the patient deployment, very good employee engagement scores, and a real focus on costs, on expenses.
Together in an attractive sector, these are all ingredients that have driven an owner's earnings per share CAGR of 11% over the last 10 years, while the shares offer a 4.6% yield today. Digital. What do we mean by digital? To us, it means to what extent is a company embracing technology and adapting to the changing environment, which has clearly accelerated in the last two years with AI. For this example, I thought I would highlight RELX, which is a relatively recent investment from two years ago. Now, RELX has several businesses, and what these businesses share is that they will have huge amounts of content, huge amounts of data, much of it proprietary, which they then embed into technology solutions, and they then embed those tech solutions into the workflows of their customers, be it universities, insurance companies, or the legal profession.
Now, in the context of AI, it's relevant to all areas of RELX's business, like it is to all businesses, I think. Where it has been most visible to date for RELX, certainly, is in its LexisNexis legal offering, where it's a key reference tool for many legal professionals. RELX was super fast at launching higher-value product iterations that have AI tools embedded, certainly faster than its peers as far as we can tell. They have also launched a legal AI assistant, which they call Protege. Now, that's enabled the growth rate of the legal division to increase by 300 basis points-400 basis points in the last couple of years as the market has responded very positively to it, and they can really see the real value add from these new AI offerings.
The last thing I just highlight here is, and it's applicable to all three of those companies, that they each have a management team that has been there for 10 years+ , and their strategies have remained consistent throughout that period. Now, that cannot always be the case, but for us, that's also a great sign of quality. That's a great sign of a good culture, and it's a sign that the strategy is right and working, and that really aligns with our long-term approach. On that, let me hand back to Alan to talk through three other examples.
I'm going to talk through a couple more examples, starting with pricing power. Pricing power is a really important part of this matrix. Often it's driven by a company having a super necessary product or limited competition.
For us, a company that has pricing power, we would define it as one that can consistently raise its prices above inflation without noticeably impacting demand. It is very valuable as it drives operating leverage and has a non-linear impact on earnings per share growth. Moody's is a great example of a business in the portfolio that has this. They are a credit ratings agency, and what they do is allow fixed-income investors to assess credit risk on bonds. There are two key reasons why this is such a great business. Firstly, it is around limited competition, and that is because most debt is rated by at least two or three rating agencies, and there are only three large ones globally. Secondly, it is around the necessity of the rating, as many fixed-income investors require a rating, so issuers need to have them.
Interestingly, a couple of years back, we had a meeting with the previous CEO of Moody's. At the end of the meeting, he talked about a call that he had with Warren Buffett during the global financial crisis. At the time, Berkshire Hathaway were significant shareholders in Moody's. He effectively wanted to speak to Warren because obviously there is a lot of volatility going on in the market, and he wanted to see if Warren had any questions. He only had one question, and that was, can you still raise prices? The CEO said yes, and Warren Buffett hung up. Competition. PMI, Philip Morris, is a company that also demonstrates pricing power. This is partially driven by the fact that they have limited competition in their smoke-free business. By way of background, there are two core businesses at PMI.
One is their legacy cigarettes business, and then the second one is their fast-growing smoke-free business. Inside that is their IQOS product, which is their heat-not-burn product, and ZYN, which are nicotine pouches. Now, if we look at their IQOS product, PMI were the first to scale this globally. This enabled them to get to a 75% market share in a growing category. This success made them want to invest further into R&D, which then allowed them to continuously improve the product, which then allowed them to maintain dominant share whilst growing rapidly in this category. What is also interesting is that if you think about them converting users from cigarettes across all brands, so not just their own, into this new category, the economics are highly attractive.
Back in 2016, PMI committed to a smoke-free future, and from that standing start, it's now 40% of their revenue. Turning to capital allocation. This is also a critical component of long-term value creation. Now, the ability to generate free cash flow is really only half the story. How you deploy that capital is super important. Texas Instruments, who are a leading global semiconductor company, are a great example of consistent, transparent capital allocation. From a consistency perspective, TI made a shift about 15 years or so ago where they moved away from personal electronics, which had a very short product life cycle, into more industrial and automotive, which had a much longer product life cycle, and in addition, structural and content tailwinds. As a consequence, the revenue shifted from around 40% at that point to around 70% today in those areas.
We reviewed management commentary from throughout this period, and you could see that the message was very clear and consistent. In addition, the management were willing to invest during downturns. For example, they bought equipment at great prices for their fabs during the GFC, whilst others were pulling back. Secondly, around transparency. TI publishes a capital allocation framework, and this is very rare for public companies. Their sole focus is around growing free cash flow per share. The framework includes a lot of details around CapEx, R&D, dividends, share buybacks. We feel that this consistency and transparency on capital allocation around this growing free cash flow per share is one of the reasons it is such a quality company. Obviously, this matrix is very important to assessing quality.
As we've done it for a number of years now, we see that a lot of certain business traits drop out of it. I thought it would be kind of useful to bring to life a couple of these. The first one is around decentralized structures. We think that these work for a couple of reasons. Firstly, employees feel empowered and often think like owners. Secondly, it can preserve an entrepreneurial DNA even as a company scales, and it also encourages accountability. It is important to note that decentralization only works if incentives are aligned. We focus closely on this. An example of a company that sits in this category is POOLCORP . They are the dominant pool distribution company in North America. They have a wide network of around 450 branches throughout the states.
Decisions are encouraged by management to be made at these local branches so they can really tailor them to the local client base. We think that this is an important factor to their long-term success. We also like quality companies that have recurring revenues and an installed base of products or services. Now, a lot of people would just think of SaaS businesses here, but POOLCORP and Thermo Fisher would sit here too. One of the key questions for us, though, is why these revenues are recurring. From our perspective, it is actually okay if there is cyclicality to them. What we want is a product or service that is vital to customers, as that often leads to high retention and pricing power. A notable example of a company that sits here would be Oracle .
Their enterprise resource planning software is embedded in the businesses and mission-critical for their customers. It is very sticky, as once in the ecosystem, customers rarely leave. Oracle have had a leadership position in this area now for decades. Finally, if we turn to another attractive trait, that is around great cultures and an owner's mentality. This resonates with us here at Caledonia as we have these. Culture is an important intangible because it can reinforce a moat. For example, a frugal culture in a cost-sensitive industry can be a real edge. Henry is going to bring this to life later with Fastenal. We value companies where leadership behaves like owners, making long-term decisions that can benefit us all as investors.
For example, investing through downturns, as I highlighted with Texas Instruments, you can get your CapEx a lot cheaper, or indeed funding projects that may depress near-term earnings but then set up things beautifully for the future. Ben covered Big Yellow, but another company that sits here is Watsco. Watsco are North America's largest distributor of air conditioning equipment. A number of years ago, they started to make investments into their technology and sales staff. This initially depressed profits but then has subsequently transformed the growth trajectory of the business. In fact, it was what gave us the opportunity to buy at the start. I would also highlight that actually Watsco hits all of these boxes. It is a decentralized business that has recurring revenues and an installed base, and it has this ownership mentality and great culture.
My colleague Lucy and I decided to do a deep-dive podcast on it for something called Business Breakdowns Series. Business Breakdowns is a leading investing podcast series with over 70,000 downloads for their episodes. They have a target listener base of institutional investors. As Matt already pointed out, we've had positive feedback from investors in Caledonia who have listened to it. Because of this depth of research, I think it gives a really good overview of what we do on the research side. I do recommend a listen, and there are details available on our website. I'm going to play a short clip from that conversation now when Lucy captures their culture really well. After that, Henry is going to do a case study on Fastenal.
Watsco is the gold standard ownership culture and underpinned by the decentralized model.
You can think of Watsco really as a company of entrepreneurs, management, and employees who really do think and act like owners of this company, and they're taking decisions for the longer term. We went out to their headquarters in Miami, and I felt like this really just brought it to life for us. We sat around what I'm sure was a purposely round board table, and the door was open throughout our conversations with key leaders popping in. It was clear that we were sitting amongst their chosen family. I noticed the phrase competition of ideas. They just had this passion to continually evolve, be better, be smarter, do things differently. Also, what's really important is they're looking to disrupt themselves as leaders.
Thank you very much, Lucy and Alan. My name is Henry Morris. I'm a Director in the Public Companies team.
I'm going to talk to you today about a company that The Wall Street Journal once described as having the cheapest CEO in America, so much so that when traveling with his CFO to a conference in Chicago, they even shared a room in a motel outside the city limits because it was cheaper. I think it's just one snippet into the fascinating culture of Fastenal. Fastenal is a distributor of industrial products in the US, and I'm going to discuss today what it was that caught our eye, the timeline of the investment process, and what we've done since we've invested in the company. Now, we really like to understand the history of a company when we start to look at it. I think it often tells you a lot about their culture and values and how they've got to where they are.
Fastenal was founded in the late 1960s by a chap called Bob Kierlin. Like many good entrepreneurs, he came from a hardworking blue-collar background, which instilled that frugality that I mentioned at the start. He was also entrepreneurial, and it was actually while working as a boy at his father's auto shop that he noticed many customers would come in and purchase fasteners. These are screws, bolts, nuts, things that tie things together. There were many different permutations of these fasteners, so it was often quite difficult for his father to stock all the kind of products that customers wanted. He thought there was the need for a specialty hardware store that stocked all of the fasteners, hence the name Fastenal. With that mindset of concentrating on availability of stock, they opened their first store in Winona, Minnesota.
This is a small Midwest town, about a two-hour drive south along the Mississippi River from the Twin Cities. From that first store, Fastenal has now expanded into a business with over $7.5 billion of revenues. It has 3,600 locations, of which more than 2,000 are in a customer's facility. At that stage, the customer has effectively outsourced their inventory and supply chain management to Fastenal. Fastenal has also been a pioneer in industrial vending, and you can see an example in the picture on the right there. These are particularly useful for larger SKUs such as safety supplies, which is now a large part of Fastenal's product mix. If you think about a use case for this, imagine an Amazon employee picking or packing goods. They might need a new set of safety gloves or goggles.
Rather than walk 300 m-400 m to the end of the warehouse to fill in a paper form and hopefully get some gloves in their size, they can just go to the vending machine with their card, get the gloves, and carry on with their job. It significantly improves employee productivity. Now, Amazon also monitors how many gloves an employee is getting through. It also greatly reduces theft and wastage. Finally, all of these vending machines are linked to Fastenal's platform, so they know the amount of stock in each vending machine, and they can make sure that they're always fully supplied. It is really more than just a sort of point-to-point industrial distributor. It is really an outsourced inventory management and procurement function for U.S. manufacturing. I mentioned the culture at the start.
Fastenal does have a genuinely differentiated culture, and that's really been driven by the founder, Bob Kierlin. It's one of frugality, empowerment, and ownership. I'll discuss that briefly in the next slide. This is the quality matrix that Ben spoke about. It's sort of the lens we use to look at all of our companies to determine whether we think they're worth investing in. Now, Fastenal ticks a number of these boxes, but there are just three I'll pull out. The first is business moat and resilience. With Fastenal here, the key is their network of on-site locations at the customer facility. It's their own distribution fleet, which greatly improves their margins. It's their scale and service culture. They've got very long-standing customer relationships. They're seen as an extremely reliable supplier.
That is critical if you are running a manufacturing plant where any stoppage of the line because of a missing bolt or screw could be really expensive. Next is digital. Fastenal have really differentiated themselves versus other distributors by offering their vending machines and also what they call Fastenal Managed Inventory, which are effectively plastic boxes stocked with nuts and bolts in the assembly line of a customer. Now, together, these account for over 40% of Fastenal's sales, and they are all connected up via Bluetooth to Fastenal's platform. This not only allows for more efficient restocking on Fastenal's part, but it also gives customers really unique data on consumption at point of use and all the analytics that go along with that.
If you compare this to a point-to-point distributor competitor, like a Grainger, for example, who drops supply off at the back door of the warehouse, it's really not something they can offer, and it's really something that is unique to Fastenal. The last one is owner mentality. Bob Kierlin, the founder, was CEO until 2002. He was Chairman until 2014. He actually continued to live in Winona and was often in and around the headquarters right up until his passing earlier this year. The culture has remained very present, and there have only been three CEOs since Bob retired. They operate a decentralized model with very little bureaucracy. Right from the very beginning of the company to now, employees effectively run their own small business at branch level.
They're incentivized by gross profit growth at the branch, and they're given a relatively free hand on how they do that. Now, that means you have a very long-tenured employee base. In fact, over 95% of branch managers and above are internal hires. The last thing I'd mention, which has really sort of came to light during our interactions with Fastenal, is their openness and honesty. There's very little corporate spin. They're very transparent and, interestingly, very willing to admit mistakes. That's something understandably that's quite rare in the corporate world. It's a quality actually that Buffett talked about in his annual letter to shareholders this year. What does this all mean? First, it's a company that is simple to understand. There have been no big changes to geography or end market. There's no debt. Growth is entirely organic. There are easy-to-read financial statements with no adjustments.
Again, quite a rare sign. Next, and critically, the moat is not just wide, but it is durable. One of the things we really like about these B2B distributor businesses like Fastenal or POOLCORP or Watsco is there's very little sort of AI or software innovation risk. We sort of know what they'll be doing in 10 years' time. In Fastenal's case, they've been installing vending machines for 16 years. They've actually been with a customer on-site for even longer. It would take a really long time for a competitor to try and break down their advantages. This ultimately leads to a company that is delivering high single-digit organic revenue growth despite operating in a very mature end market. It's got attractive operating margins, good returns on capital employed.
Actually, interestingly, from our point of view, it's highly free cash flow generative and pays out a good dividend. It was suitable for both portfolios. This next chart just shows, we are talking about the research and investing timeline. The chart here is the price to owner's earnings multiple for Fastenal. It's one of the valuation metrics we use when thinking about an appropriate multiple or price to enter into a stock. Again, I've used it here just to demonstrate our timeline. It was actually Matt, when he led the team, who first looked at Fastenal in 2017. As you can see from the chart, Fastenal and the other distributors had derated with concerns about Amazon disrupting the business model. Having looked at Fastenal and a number of their competitors, we decided to start some deep work on Fastenal in mid-2019.
With other members of the team, by early 2020, we concluded it had ticked all the quality boxes. Now all we needed to do was wait for the price to be in the green. As it happens, in this case, COVID came along and gave us an opportunity to invest in the company much sooner than we might normally expect. Given we knew the company so well, we were happy to invest in that very volatile period. We were buying the shares in March 2020. The fortunate thing was it gave us a really attractive margin of safety, and we were able to buy at an average multiple of 20 times, which was close to the low since the GFC . Once we own a stock, our aim is really to hold onto it, ideally forever.
There is no real incentive to sell a position if it has done well after 12 months. It is simply not in our DNA. That is not to say we will never take any action. Indeed, we did top slice some of the position at the end of last year. It had grown in size. As you can see from the chart, the valuation was really pushing the very top of the historic range. Generally, we like to let the compounding work. You can see the outcome here. We have obviously been very pleased with the TSR since we have owned it. I also think if you own a stock over a number of years, you really notice the absolute growth. For example, the owner's earnings are nearly 50% higher than when we invested in the company five years ago.
The dividend has been growing at a 12% CAGR. That is not just to say that we sit and sort of pat ourselves on the back and do nothing else afterwards. We continue to learn. We have been out to see Fastenal a number of times. We like to talk to the CFO, as Ben mentioned, usually outside of the earnings season. One of the things this allows us to do is to really look under the hood. We often try and ask management teams, for example, about their internal KPIs and keep a track on them. For Fastenal, this might be new large customer signings, which are a good indicator of market share gains. The last thing I would say is there is a huge amount of reading involved in this job.
We really try to focus on content that an owner of the business or a customer or a competitor might read, such as trade magazines or interviews or podcasts or books. I have highlighted one here. This is called The Power of Fastenal People, which was really a leadership book that Bob Kierlin wrote, primarily aimed at his colleagues at Fastenal. It is a wonderful book. If you can get hold of it, it is out of print, but I would highly recommend reading it. Reading that just really instills, you get a real good feeling for the culture of Fastenal. You know that it is more than just words on a page. We can see it when we go out and visit the companies. For example, that willingness to admit mistakes is clearly highlighted in the book here.
Lastly, for me, I would just say that I think investing remains a highly relationship-driven business. Nothing beats going out to visit a company. What we often find, more often than not, if we do, and if we ask thoughtful and interesting questions, that despite our relatively small size, so we're only just in the top 100 shareholders of Fastenal, we tend to get good access to management and to broader employees. I'll just end with this quote that was provided to us by the former CFO of Fastenal. If I just read out the middle line there, "Caledonia's focus on long-term TSR and questions around strategy rather than quarters produces discussions that are engaging and mutually insightful.
I had as much chance to learn as to educate in our discussion." I think that encapsulates very nicely the quality of interaction that we aim to have with all of our corporates. I hope that quick dash through Fastenal has been interesting. Needless to say, I could go on for much longer. As Ben said, we really do love learning about great companies and people. In the interest of time, I'm going to hand back to Alan.
Right, turning to performance. We have a very good long-term track record. As you can see, we've achieved a cumulative return of 165% over the past 10 years. That's annualized at just over 10%. That's ahead of Caledonia's target of inflation plus 3%-6% and the capital portfolio's target of 10%.
That is really a function of our strategy, our investment process, and the team that we have here. It is also very scalable and liquid, so we can continue to grow the size of our investments by simply putting more pounds into them whilst keeping the same benefits of concentration and focus that we have described. The portfolio also benefits from active risk management. We have top sliced over GBP 215 million over the past 10 years, and that has been available and used for attractive opportunities within the broader Caledonia and within the public companies' portfolios. With that, I will hand over to Ben, who will cover the income performance and conclude before we go to our panel.
Okay, thanks, Alan. This shows the 10-year performance of the income portfolio.
As I said earlier, the income portfolio was significantly repositioned in FY 2020 and FY 2021 after we took on the mandate at the end of 2019. You can see the reset of the strategy on the chart there. We pivoted to higher quality. We introduced that yield-on-cost metric, that concept. Just as a sense, we actually only retain three of the 20 companies we inherited. There has been significant change in the portfolio over the last few years. Now, the income from this portfolio is growing nicely. On a pro forma basis, today's portfolio would have delivered a 5.8% CAGR in terms of dividend income growth to Caledonia over the last 10 years. Hopefully, you can also see that the overall performance is improving too, as that compounding really begins to get going.
In summary, we provide Caledonia shareholders with a portfolio of high-quality companies, many of which are on the global stage. We're an experienced team, and we believe you build wealth by owning the best companies for the long term and not trading them frequently, which is what you see across most of the market. That is reflected in our long holding periods in both portfolios, letting the compounding do the work. Caledonia's structure is a key enabler of this differentiated approach. With a combination of permanent capital and no benchmark, it enables us to take advantage of opportunities and not to worry about flows, not to worry about market noise. The output of this is strong long-term performance, which can be seen in the capital portfolio today and which is now coming through in the income portfolio following the strategy reset. Thank you all.
That concludes the presentation. We are now going to move on to the panel session and Q&A, which Anthony Leatham from Peel Hunt is going to moderate.
Great stuff. Thank you very much. Really interesting session and a lot of detail in there. Thank you very much for inviting me to facilitate this panel session. We'll spend a few minutes asking the questions and then open up to questions from the floor and online. I think on the penultimate slide, it was really interesting. Two portfolios, a really concentrated approach, GBP 1 billion invested in 30 companies. I'll bring you in here, Alan, and just ask maybe to add a bit more of the day-to-day. How is the team set up in terms of your coverage, the interaction between team members, maybe even the competition for capital?
Sure. Thanks. We're effectively a team of six people.
We've worked together now for a very long period of time. We get on really well. We know each other's strengths and weaknesses. We're all generalists, but we know the portfolio companies extremely well. I'd also say, probably more importantly, we know how to identify these patterns of quality that I highlighted. I think in terms of coverage, each individual has probably more certain expertise in certain areas. By conscious design, we make sure that some of the more important areas, for example, technology, B2B distributors, or the REITs, we have multiple team members who own that. In terms of the day-to-day and stock coverage, we work in pairs. It's generally one of the team plus either Ben or I. We find that gives us two perspectives when we go to management meetings or investor days. I find that's really been beneficial.
Thank you. So Ben, maybe extend that thought process. We heard a lot about the detailed analysis and, if you like, the stock selection process. Maybe we could talk a bit more about risk. How do you manage risk? What would make you sell? Any examples that you've had?
Yeah, sure. In terms of risk, I guess there are many components of that. The kind of three main areas I guess we focus on is, one, getting the right company into each portfolio. Two, thinking about the sizing of each position and also at the sector level. Three, just the valuation. I can drill into each of those a bit more. In terms of making sure we have the right companies, hopefully it came across in terms of the amount of work we do for each position.
There's an in-depth process that we go through. We have the quality matrix, which is a key part of that. We really think long and hard before we make an investment or an investment gets approved. That does not mean to say that we do not make mistakes. Quite frankly, the investment thesis can change because a company has a strategic change, or there is a change in management, or there is an acquisition that means that it no longer is sort of doing what we think it is going to do. That is a situation we will look to replace it at some point. These portfolios are all about constantly improving the quality. We change one or two positions a year, and that is all about quality improvement.
In terms of sizing, I mentioned that PMI was the largest holding across both portfolios, around 10% of the total AUM at 31st of March. We would not want to go much above that from a risk management side. What we do is we tend to top slice. I guess the best examples of that are Microsoft and Oracle over the last five years. Both have done extremely well. We have top sliced around GBP 60 million from both positions in total over that period. We always have to weigh up how well they are doing with their sizing. Risk management demands that we do top slice them when they get to a certain size, and that is what we have done. I guess, finally, just on valuation, I think Fastenal was a great example of that.
We always try to go into a new position with the margin of safety. In the case of Fastenal, we did not have to wait very long because the pandemic turned up straight after it was approved. We also will top slice if the valuation is looking a bit stretched in our view. One other thing maybe worth mentioning, actually, and we think about a lot, is the kind of the risk of omission, actually, because we do a lot of work on finding these new companies, getting them onto the approved list. There is actually at least one company in that list that I can think of where it got very close to our buy flag, but did not quite get there, and we did not convert, and has since done very, very well. That is hindsight investing, I know.
I guess it's just a reminder that the opportunities to buy these really high-quality companies don't come along very often. When they do, you really got to take them. I think it was mentioned a couple of times in the presentation, this whip list. That's the sort of subbench of ideas. Can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, we have many lists. We have an approved list, which has been approved, and we could go out and buy today if there was an opportunity in the market. There's a whip list of names that we're working on as a team. There are different prioritizations on those depending on how strong we think they are as ideas and also their relative valuation.
Great stuff. Henry, almost every presentation that I hear these days involves reference to the use of artificial intelligence.
How do you think about AI, and how do you bring it maybe into your process?
Yeah, I think AI is a tool, and like any new tool, for it to be successful, it really needs to have two conditions. One, that there's permission or encouragement within the firm to use it. Secondly, that we have proper training. I'm pleased to say at Caledonia, both of those conditions are met. I think from our point of view, there are two things that AI is useful for, or at least understanding it. The first is knowing the implications on our companies of AI and how it might impact them. Clearly, there's a second thing, which is, does it make our research process more efficient? I think in the early stages, it certainly is helpful, and we all actively use it.
What I would say is, and it perhaps came out with the culture of Fastenal, AI will not tell me what the taxi driver on the way to the Fastenal meeting thought of the company. It will not tell me that there is no reserve parking space for the CEO or CFO outside the company office, or that there is a plaque inside with the 40-year, 10-year employees. I definitely still think you need to go out and meet the people and visit the companies, but certainly for some early-stage research, it is very helpful.
I presume it also features as part of the analysis and investment thesis around just whether AI presents a threat to a business model.
Absolutely.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that I quite like is sleep well at night stocks, and these distributors, for example, actually, they're using AI to help them, but there's not the same rapid innovation risk that you might have with some other industries.
Okay, Ben, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Your favorite company in the portfolio and why?
It's a bit of a cop-out, but we don't have favorite companies. It's not really, I guess, the way the team is wired. We've actually focused on portfolio. There's always going to be some years where you have really good performers and less good performers, but we're really focusing on the opportunity over the 10 years. I think that really comes back to, hopefully, again, the way the team is set up. Again, to stress, we are rewarded on portfolio performance, not on ideas.
People are not attached to particular ideas. The fact that there's a sort of good degree of a very flat structure means that there's a good degree of discussion and constructive challenge across all portfolio names. We always continue to look to improve the quality of each portfolio over time by gradually replacing names as we see fit.
I did not get my company, but I take your point. I will start with you, Alan, but maybe for the whole panel, if we could take a step back from the detail of the companies and maybe bring everyone up to speed with your view of the world. Obviously, there's a lot to take on, whether it's tariffs.
We talked about what happened in April and the impact of Liberation Day, but now we're dealing with the shortest ceasefire in history. Where to for interest rates, oil prices, supply chains? There's a lot to take on. I'll hand you that baton now.
Okay, I'll try my best to answer that. Let me try and do it in two ways. Firstly, I'll talk a little bit about what we did in the sell-off, and then I can cover a little bit the way we think about macro. In terms of what we did in the sell-off, these are opportunities that, as long-term investors, we want to take up. We want to take advantage of, right? Because it's a great way to make money when you have great prices available. In April, we spent GBP 50 million, and we did that in two ways.
Firstly was around targeted top-ups of existing holdings. Then secondly was initiation of a new position. When I'm trading in this sort of period, I think about probably two key things. Firstly is around the valuation of the businesses that we're looking to add to. Is this a great business that we're getting a really great price right now? The second one is around risk and is trying to understand what is causing this particular sell-off and is that having a material impact on the business? A great example would be we topped up a name called Charter Communications. They're a US cable business. Effectively, they have no direct impact from President Trump's tariffs. This is a great way to take advantage of negative sentiment and yet not be impacted by the risk that it was generating.
It's also worth saying we also can buy a new position. In COVID, we bought Fastenal. In April, I'm happy to disclose that we bought into Charles Schwab. This is a fantastic company that we've been following for years now. It's a leader in the U.S. wealth management and brokerage space with over $10 trillion of assets under management. In April, we got a really great opportunity to buy into that. We're very excited about that holding. Maybe I'll briefly talk about the macro. I don't know, Ben, if you want to cover tariffs.
Yeah, sure.
On the macro side of things, I think what's important to be aware of is that we don't try and predict macro, but we're very cognizant of the impacts on valuations.
For example, be that systemic sort of things in terms of interest rate moves that we had over the last couple of years when it pushed out the swap curve, we changed the way we valued things. Then secondly, whether there's any specific macro that impacts the operations of our businesses. That we're obviously very cognizant of. We don't spend time on predicting, but we reflect it where appropriate. I don't know if you want to talk about that.
Yeah, I mean, I guess on tariffs, when you do have these macro events or these geopolitical events, you have a good look at the portfolio and see what sort of impact there might be on your portfolio companies. We're mindful that the tariffs were in a sort of gray area here. We'll see what happens on the 9th of July.
We actually think the kind of overall, we have quite limited impact on the portfolio. There are a few companies around the edges, but not a big impact. I think from the broader Trump administration and the kind of the policy agenda, the bigger impact we've probably seen is on kind of research budgets. Obviously, you've seen the Trump administration had a bit of a war on certain universities, which is affecting grants to certain parts of the research environment in the U.S., the ecosystem there. There's obviously a big debate on the kind of the National Institute of Health budgets for 2026. Now, the NIH in the U.S. is one of the big, it is the big federal funder of research, particularly early-stage research, which then feeds into the life sciences players like Thermo Fisher. Where we are seeing is some hesitation around there.
We'll see what happens with the House and the Senate in terms of the NIH budget for next year. That's going to happen over the next few months. It's interesting to see, perhaps looking back to the first Trump administration in 2016, there was the same discussion, and the NIH budget actually went up. We'll see what the outcome of that is. Having said that, the companies we're in, and particularly Thermo Fisher, we think the life sciences market generally is a great place to be for the long term, and Thermo Fisher is super well placed to enjoy that over the longer term.
Great stuff. Thank you very much for that. All the great answers and detail there. I might hand over to Matt for concluding remarks and Q&A.
Thanks, Anthony. Have we got any questions? We've got one over here.
Thank you. I just wanted to sort of get a feel for how do you allocate between the sort of two portfolios? Is there sort of periodic rebalancing and kind of what triggers that? You mentioned that Philip Morris was in both. What is the sort of degree of overlap between the two? Thanks.
Ben, why don't you pick that up?
Across the total public company side, we have obviously an asset allocation framework that takes in private companies as well as the funds team within Caledonia. That is then split between capital and income. Income, we feel, is at the right level now. At the AUM, we are around GBP 270 million-GBP 275 million. That is the right level to generate the level of income that Caledonia would like from it in terms of contribute to its costs and dividends.
In terms of the broad asset allocation, the spare capacity will go to capital if there's the opportunity to add. In terms of holdings, there are obviously, it's a slightly different universe of stocks we fish in for the income and capital, but there are companies that overlap. Fastenal was a good example because actually, in normal times, the income portfolio wouldn't have been able to buy that because the yield is typically too low. We were able to buy it in March 2020 when the yield jumped because of the pandemic. That went in. In terms of PMI, that was one actually that met all the requirements for the income portfolio and the capital portfolio from day one. We've sort of had an investment in PMI in capital since 2016.
When we took on the income portfolio, it was very natural for us to say, well, we knew PMI very well. That can come into the income portfolio too because it meets all the criteria.
I'd also add that sometimes in the States, you get companies which have a slightly different capital allocation strategy. For example, Watts could do pay basically or mostly dividends is the way they do it. They do not do buybacks. In Texas Instruments, they also basically hand back all their free cash flow. There is a way that effectively allows you sometimes to get a higher growth name in the States, like a really good quality name that will meet the income portfolio's requirements.
Thank you.
Hi, guys. Question around the geographic sort of weighting. I suppose clearly you are heavily sort of overweight, but you have got a massive allocation towards U.S. companies.
Looking towards other geographies around the world, how do you look at the world? I suppose some big companies in Asia that are quite exciting.
Sure. So yeah, we have around 65% across both portfolios that are headquartered in the U.S. Actually, when you look across the portfolio, most of the companies have effectively global revenue streams. But stepping back, what we're looking for, as we've sort of tried to lay it out, is really quality. So we're looking at this quality matrix, and we're trying to find the companies that are really in the right tail of that, the sort of two-standard deviation, three-standard deviation, really high quality. And so that's what we look for. And what we sometimes find is that you kind of get these great business models at scale and liquidity. You only really find those quite often in the States.
That is why that is more of an output. In terms of other areas, we do have a holding in Alibaba. This is a company. It is a smaller holding within the capital portfolio. It has been there a few years now. It is a way, it is an extremely large company that we feel is very attractively priced with a lot of kind of interesting dynamics. It is something that we picked from a quality basis. It is also a great way to have exposure to Asia and sort of follow that space given its global impacts.
The only thing I would just add is, again, I mean, these are generally global businesses, but because the U.K. and Europe is generally more income-rich and the U.S. is generally more growth-rich, the kind of the income portfolio is slightly higher weighting to U.K. and Europe, and the capital portfolio is slightly higher weighting to the U.S. That is just the nature of where we fish.
Thank you very much. Matt and Robert promised me a lovely presentation, and it exactly turned out that. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you very much. In terms of high-quality companies, these are proper old, established companies. I wish one of my grandfathers had established them. Life would have been different. These are really high-quality companies. I have got zero, zero doubts about them. The only problem in my head is around their valuations.
I'm glad, Ben, at two, three occasions you mentioned the word top slicing. If you see these are first-class companies, they may be listed in the U.S., but they genuinely are global companies. What has happened is because of the U.S. listing, they've enjoyed a very good P multiple re-ratings over the last 10 years-15 years. Where we are right now, I mean, the valuations are really a thorn in the neck. What are your thoughts around that?
Let me start. I think if we take a step back, first of all, the strategy, we really want to be long-term owners. We think that is the best way to generate strong long-term returns. Market timing, actually, we're not too bad in terms of buying when there have been sell-offs, but generally, it's quite hard to do.
We think about backing the best companies for the long term as the best way to get those strong long-term performance. I guess within that, you have to just think about the sizing of the positions, which I mentioned top slicing several times. It is something that, particularly with the U.S. names, has occupied our thinking a lot over the last few years. Hopefully, you can see that with Microsoft and Oracle in particular as an example. Across the portfolio, there have been top slicing, and I would say mainly the U.S. names. Having said that, we know these companies really well. We think on a 10-year view, they are going to continue to do really well.
We do not think it is worth chopping and changing for the sake of a few points, particularly when some of these companies are growing at 10%, 15%, 20%, particularly in the case of Microsoft. Those multiples come down quite quickly.
I would also add actually something interesting that we also, as well as top slice, we actually buy back, right? We have bought Microsoft in the last couple of years. We have bought Oracle. We bought Oracle in April. What is kind of interesting actually, and we are cognizant of the market environment. When rates gapped out at the end of 2022, what happened was some of the higher multiple names became significantly cheaper than what was deserved. We bought Microsoft. We bought Oracle at the start of that period. We can do the opposite too.
We're cognizant of those market moves. That's how we think about it.
All right. Thanks for the presentation. Just thinking of the approved list, how many stocks are on that roughly? What's the capacity to bring them into the portfolio with what you said about you're happy with the diversification?
On the approved list today, we have five approved names. We think around five- 10 is about the right number in terms of capacity in our team. We obviously hold those up against the existing holdings, and we will hopefully replace them over time. That's not to say that one out is then one in.
If we think it's the right thing to do to sell an existing holding because it no longer meets our requirement, then we will, and then we'll wait for that opportunity to hopefully put in one of the approved list names when the market gives us an opportunity.
Thank you.
That's it from the room, I think.
Yeah, I'm quite conscious of time, so I'll take a couple of questions online. The first is similar in terms of risk of what Anthony asked Ben, but when analyzing companies, how do you avoid falling victim to the halo effect as described by Phil Rosenzweig in his seminal book? For those unfamiliar with the concept, it describes how investors frequently take successful companies and then attribute their success to elements of their strategy. For unsuccessful firms, they attribute their failure to factors that may or may not have been relevant.
This classic example in the book is Cisco when it was a hot stock in the late 1990s. Investors, analysts, and media queued up to attribute Cisco's successful growth to a decentralized business approach, entrepreneurial culture, and the ability to make lucrative bolt-on acquisitions. When things fell apart in the early 2000s, the same group of people attributed the company's problems to overexpansion, lack of focus, especially with regard to cost control and weak corporate culture.
Yeah, I think John Chambers, Cisco CEO, is a very interesting character. If you look at the valuation of Cisco in the dot-com era and going into that, it went astronomical. It is quite an interesting, so that is why you cannot separate necessarily quality. You have to link the quality of the business and the valuation. Ultimately, we have found that, and you see this statistically, that persistence of quality.
Actually, you do find that a business with certain attributes does persist over time. You have to be aware of hoovery around it, so we're cognizant of that. I think that's kind of how we think about it.
The final question. Given the closed-end nature of the fund and the long-term horizon, have you considered abandoning the income strategy and purely focusing on the higher total return delivered by the capital strategy?
Maybe at last I have a question to answer. The answer is we're delighted with both strategies. They do add to the diversification. Interestingly, in the year that's just passed, the income strategy actually performed stronger than the capital strategy. It's still early in the evenings judging performance. Additionally, we do like the income that the income strategy provides.
We do like the fact that the capital strategy has no income target, so it is completely unconstrained. It is good for Caledonia to have that income coming in. Thank you. Thank you, Becks. I will bring the session to a close. We are nearly there. First of all, many thanks. Many thanks to Anthony. Many thanks to Alan, Ben, and Henry, and Lucy for putting it all together, and the rest of the team at Caledonia for putting on what I think is a great spotlight and putting yourselves in the best possible light. I hope you agree with me that it really does show how the rubber meets the road on time well invested. You should really feel how that approach to investing actually works in practice. You would have felt that before as well, hopefully, with the private company spotlight.
I found we have a very experienced and capable team, and they work as a team. They have a very clear strategy and a great track record, and it demonstrates a very repeatable investment process and performance, which we are very pleased with. They do benefit from being within Caledonia. I like to think, and I think they have said it themselves, that we provide them with great support and stability to execute their strategy and critically be very patient about when they invest. They are waiting for the right opportunities, but when those opportunities come along, we are right behind them, and they move. You get these bargains. They are there for a couple of hours. You have to move quickly because they can be fleeting.
By doing that on every single position just means we're installing a margin of safety against our shareholders' capital when we move from cash into shares. Thank you very much for that. Just as a reminder, we've got the Private Capital Spotlight on our website. This will be on the website. We've got the funds spotlight to look forward to in January. With that, I'll bring the session to a close.