Good afternoon, everybody, and a very warm welcome to our pre-AGM webinar for the Henderson Smaller Companies Investment Trust. Thank you very much for joining us today. I'm Penny Freer. I'm the Chair of the Board, and it's my pleasure to host this session. I joined the Board of the Henderson Smaller Companies Investment Trust in 2018 and have since been privileged to help guide our strategic direction and the stewardship of shareholder value. Today's gathering is particularly important as I invite all of you, our shareholders, to vote in our upcoming annual general meeting, which is scheduled for 11:30 A.M. on Tuesday, the 7th of October, at 201 Bishopsgate. There will also be a Zoom connection for anyone who can't travel. The company has a continuation vote this year, and I strongly encourage you to vote in favor of our continuation.
Instructions for voting, proxy forms, and access details are all available. Let me outline our agenda for today. First of all, the Chair's welcome, which I'm delivering to you right now. Next, you'll hear our Fund Manager, Indriyati Van Heen, presentation, in which she'll discuss the investment portfolio, recent developments, and outlook. Indriyati's presentation will be followed by a Q&A session, moderated by Janus Henderson's Head of Investment Trusts, Dan Howe, which is your opportunity to ask questions. Before I welcome Indriyati to give her presentation, let me give you a brief overview of the past financial year. Looking back on the year to 31st of May 2025, the year-end of your company, the market environment proved challenging, marked in the UK by the new Labour government with a new political and fiscal agenda.
Against this backdrop, our net asset value declined by 5.1% on a total return basis, and our share price fell by 2.3%. The company did underperform its benchmark, the Deutsche Numis Smaller Companies Index, by 10.1%. Despite some headwinds and a challenging economic environment, we enter the coming year with cautious optimism and are happy to declare a final dividend of £0.205, bringing the full-year dividend to £0.28, which represents a commendable 3.7% year-on-year growth. I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge and to thank Neil Hermon, who will retire as Portfolio Manager at the end of this month after 22 years of service. On behalf of the Board and all our shareholders, I extend our gratitude to Neil for his contribution and wish him every success and happiness in his retirement.
With that, it's my pleasure to hand over to our Portfolio Manager, Indriyati, who will take us through the portfolio's journey, our strategic positioning, and the path forward. Thank you again, everyone, for tuning in, and I hope you find this session helpful.
Thank you, Penny. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Indriyati Van Heen, the Co-Manager of this Trust. I want to use today as an opportunity to introduce myself to you, to look back on the financial year just gone, but more importantly, to look ahead at the new team, how we invest, what we've been doing, and to finally touch on some of the great opportunities we're seeing in the UK smaller companies space. Let's recap on the financial year to the 31st of May 2025, which was both a disappointing year for fund performance and a disappointing year for the UK small-cap asset class, which continued to underperform large caps. As for the highlights, or perhaps more appropriate to call them lowlights last year, in the year to the end of May, the NAV total return fell by 5.1% and underperformed the benchmark by 10.1%.
Because our discount narrowed over the year, helped by our active buyback program, which I hope you've all noticed, the fall in the share price total return was slightly less disappointing at a negative 2%. On a more positive note, the strong cash generation in our underlying portfolio holdings meant we were able to increase our dividend by nearly 4%. This represents the 22nd consecutive year of dividend growth at the company. An all-round difficult year for the Trust after what has already been a few difficult years for performance. Lastly, this year, Neil Hermon, as Penny mentioned, the Fund Manager of the Trust for over 22 years, decided to retire. He officially leaves the building in September, after which I will take over as sole Fund Manager of the Trust.
Diving into the detail around performance, the macro backdrop and interest rates staying high for longer was a headwind, and the autumn statement brought the term stagflation back into investors' lexicon. All this hurt the interest rate-sensitive part of our portfolio. It's the stocks that drive performance in this portfolio. Whilst we benefited from strong performance of our longstanding holdings in Balfour Beatty, an international construction company, which is seeing strong orderbook growth, margin expansion, and continues to be on free cash flow, and the likes of events operator Essential, which was bid for by Informa last year, some of our larger positions hurt us. Market services and data communications company Next 15 Group profit-warned after the loss of a large Saudi contract and weak demand in tech spending.
The company has undergone management change, and whilst we appreciate how difficult it can be to turn around people-heavy businesses, it has a strong balance sheet and a Board which seems motivated to unlock shareholder value through disposals of parts of its business. We're sticking with it. Impax Asset Management continued to see outflows and lost an outsized mandate at the end of last year, which put pressure on earnings and caused them to cut their dividend. This is a position we have exited this year. After a strong run for the shares in 2024 and evidence of green shoots in the U.S. advertising market, specialist media company Future hurt us as Trump's liberation of day announcements caused a hiatus in advertising spending in March. However, the trading has steadily improved, and we continue to see excellent value in these shares and continue to retain a position.
Not owning Georgian bank TBC hurt us, as did not owning telco turnaround, Zagona Communications. Overall, a challenging year, and I want to talk a little bit later about some of the changes we're making to revive performance. Before I do this, we need to say an important farewell and thank you to Neil Hermon, the man who has managed this Trust for the last 22 years. Notwithstanding a very difficult last four years, Neil has been a fantastic custodian of this Trust, and his long-term track record is a testament to that. If you'd invested £1,000 on the day Neil took over in 2002, you'd be sitting on £16,000 at the end of May, far exceeding benchmark returns. I want to put my personal record on thanks to Neil as both a shareholder and a colleague.
He has been a fabulous mentor, and I've learned a lot from him over the last 13 years we have worked together, not all of it about football. We wish him a long and happy retirement. He remains a top shareholder and has already been pestering me about growing the dividend. That's enough about looking back. It's now time to look forward. Here is the new team taking on this well-established Trust. I say new. I've actually been involved in this Trust for the last 13 years, and I've been Deputy Manager for the last nine. In the summer of 2024, the Board made the decision to promote me to Co-Manager, which was formally enacted at our interims in January.
As for my background, before joining what was then Henderson in 2011, I did what my father would term a proper job, where I worked at PwC and got my accounting qualifications, an important skill to have when looking at small caps, where cash generation and funding requirements are so crucial to analysis when you have lots of smart people wearing great suits, carrying shiny slide decks, vying for your capital. That's an important point. We're all Portfolio Managers, but we are also analysts. We do our own stock picking. You'll also see Shiv here. He's worked on the desk for the past eight years and is a dedicated UK small-cap resource. He is also an accountant. Now, this blacked-out silhouette is our new hire. The silhouette has long hair, and an amateur sleuth or JK Rowling would probably correctly identify her as a woman.
Her gender is not what is important. What is important is that she comes with an excellent track record in UK smaller companies, and we expect her to be joining our team in November. She is not an accountant, which will offer some light relief at team drinks, but has gained banking experience in the UK small-cap space in her early career. She knows how the sausage is made, and like all good Fund Managers, knows to read prospectuses starting from the back. She is, however, a Liverpool supporter, which is odd because she is a genuine scouser. This also means that all the useless Liverpool knowledge Neil imparted upon me will not be entirely wasted. We're thrilled she's joining us. She was our top choice of candidate in a competitive field. She's a bottom-up stock picker whose existing investment process is very much aligned with our own.
Whilst we are the three who are directly responsible for the strategy, there are many others that indirectly feed into us. None of them were good-looking enough to have their pictures featured on this page, but they're all very important into feeding into the wider market debate. There's a strong culture of collaboration at Janus Henderson, which means we all have access to each other's meetings, we have weekly cross-desk equity meetings, and there's compulsory note-sharing. I wanted to give a special shout-out to our incredibly capable ESG team, who support us so well in assessing many of the non-financial risks and opportunities our companies face. That is the new lineup. Now on to UK small caps. Why are we here, or why should you want to be here? It is because the UK small-cap effect is real.
Whether over 70 years or over 25 years, small caps have outperformed large caps most of the time. There are many drivers behind the small-cap effect, including the fact that it is easier for smaller companies to grow faster and how they naturally give exposure to new products, services, and technologies in nascent growing industries. One of the main drivers of this effect is the fact that there are more alpha-generating opportunities in this part of the market. Fewer analysts cover more stocks, which results in higher stock dispersion, making it fertile hunting ground for alpha generation, great for stock pickers like us. It is for the same reason that it is worth noting to you that you cannot really invest in small caps through passive exposure. There is not liquidity in that part of the market, and one of the main reasons an active approach is key.
As the chart below shows, it has been somewhat of a lost decade for UK small caps, but we see opportunity in that, and I will come to that later. Who are we, and how do we fit into all of this? The Henderson Smaller Companies Investment Trust is an investment trust. We love this structure for investing in small caps, as it is a long-term vehicle giving investors access to unique features which we fully take advantage of. The Trust is one of the largest and most liquid trusts in the space, with around £700 million of gross assets and £600 million of net assets. You can buy this Trust at an attractive 8% to 9% discount to NAV.
We take advantage of gearing, which, using our attractively priced long-term debt, we have long-term private placements priced at around 3%, very attractive when you consider where bond yields are trading now. Over the long term, this has successfully enhanced return for investors. We have a long track record of dividend growth. We are not an income fund, but have achieved this as a happy byproduct of our longstanding investment process centered around investing in cash-generative growth companies. As a result, this Trust has AIC dividend hero status. Finally, the fee structure on the Trust is both competitive and keeps us aligned with our investors. At 35 bps, we have a low base fee, but we do have the opportunity to earn a performance fee, but only in years where we both outperform the market and make you money.
That is to say that the share price at the end of the year has to be higher than when it started the year. The base fee and performance fee together are capped at 90 bps. How do we create value? The first thing to say is that we are long-term investors, and our portfolio is constructed from the bottom up. We're stock pickers, and our philosophy is centered around stocks that give us exposure to quality growth at the right price. In industry jargon, you would call us GARP investors. We're looking for companies which are growing. That could be structural growth, that could be cyclical growth, it could be a turnaround situation. We want these companies trading on multiples which we don't think fully reflect the fundamentals and growth of that business. That is to say that we're looking for re-rating potential in companies.
In simple terms, we want to find this growth before everybody else does. That re-rating can come from something straightforward, as a company being better covered by sell-side analysts, or a company which is trading at a discount to comparable transactions or with peers with similar fundamentals. We believe it is that potent mix of earnings growth and re-ratings that drive superior returns over the long term. To conceptualize this a little bit more, I've put this diagrammatic here. No matter how good the growth story, the starting valuation has to be right. For this reason, we like to invest in the top left corner, high growth but low valuation. Let's take JTC, for instance. It is an outsourced provider of fund administration services to private clients and alternative asset managers.
It's got 90% recurring revenue in a structurally growing space and has seen over 10% organic growth over the past few years. We bought this when it was trading on a multiple of 16 times, a substantial discount to the 23 times its direct competitor SAN was taken private at in 2021. We started our position in 2022 at £6.50 and have been adding to it over time, meaningfully so this year. The stock price today is £13.50. Happily, last Friday, we learned that the company had rebuffed two takeover offers from private equity house Primera, and Warburg Pincus is now looking at making a competing offer, which should mean more upside in the shares for us. The same can be said of Chemring, a defense company supplying energetic sensors and cybersecurity services, which is seeing high single-digit top-line revenue growth.
Even at 27 times earnings, by the way, we bought it on 11, it trades at half the multiple of German-listed Rheinmetall. I could go on, but we want to buy these growing companies where their valuations are not properly reflecting their fundamentals. It is often the case that our stocks end up in the top right quadrant. In fact, we hope this happens, and that is when we decide whether or not to divest or hold on to compounders like Softcat, which has seen its strong re-rating, but we can still justify the holdings through its earnings growth and dividend yield alone. Here is a very quick reminder of our investment process. I have included this slide solely for the purposes of flagging that our investment process is not changing. It is the same slide that was in existence when I joined.
Neil has left, but the investment process remains. We will still be analyzing companies through the lens of our well-established 4Ms process, those 4Ms being the business model, money, management, and earnings momentum. We'll still be undertaking those over 300 management meetings a year. The one thing that will change under me will be the stock count. I want to focus on our highest conviction positions, so you can expect to see the tail of the portfolio continue to get cut. Cutting the tail will test conviction and force us to be more proactive with how we recycle our capital. We still want to provide you, our investors, with well-diversified exposure in the UK small-cap space, but we think this can be done with 80 or even a 70 stock list.
To give an example, when I took over, the bottom 20 stocks in our portfolio only made up 7% of the fund. Monitoring these positions takes up just as much time as monitoring a 3% position in our top 10. Sometimes they can often be more challenging and take up more time. I think that there are more effective ways for us to be using our resources. Here is a little case study I want to talk about on Circo, which I hope will bring our investment process to life. Circo is a provider of outsourced services to governments globally. It provides defense services, runs prisons, and provides immigration services, among other things. It's a fascinating company operating under 600 plus contracts, and it employs over 50,000 people worldwide.
We initiated a position on New Year's Eve in 2020, not because I'm a particularly sad person, although I would flag we were in deep COVID and there was really nothing better to do that evening. It was linked a little bit to COVID in that I'd just come back from visiting my mother in Indonesia, and that long cotton swab being inserted into my nose by the track and trace people got me thinking about Circo, the business that ran those track and trace centers for the government. It's a business I've been following for a while. It had a troubled history, but under new management, then Rupert Sones and Angus Coburn, loss-making contracts had been cleared out, provisions were no longer being used, the accounts were cleaner, and most importantly, the business was generating cash. The shares had de-rated.
They were trading on 14 times earnings when they used to trade on 20 times. Our view at the time was that demand for outsourced services was only going to increase as governments became more fiscally constrained after the pandemic. That was a big opportunity for Circo. We liked the strong balance sheet and low credit risk. As their customers are governments, they tend to always pay. The stock looked too cheap for the strong returns that it was delivering. We thought it was being punished for the fact that the high margins it was earning for running those track and trace programs would not persist and would instead be a headwind to future headline earnings growth.
We knew that these were one-offs and shouldn't have a high multiple put on them, but we also took the view that the cash it was earning from these revenues was real and fueling balance sheet opportunity. That provided us with the opportunity to buy the shares. In the four years we've owned this stock, it has doubled and delivered persistent earnings upgrades and announced five share buybacks and bought three businesses. The one thing it hasn't done is re-rating. It actually trades on 13 times now. This is exciting for me, as we've generated those earnings, those returns through earnings alone. The re-rating is still to come. Where do I think this could come from?
Organic growth should step up from 2026 as large contracts such as the prison tagging and armed forces recruitment contracts start to mobilize, and its defense business has grown to become nearly 40% of its overall revenues. In this market, even bad defense businesses trade on six times and good ones on over 20 times. We suspect that a capital markets day in H1 next year might see the margin targets lifted and help drive that re-rating. There we have it. That is GARP in action. We are buying shares seeing earnings growth which have re-rating potential. Now it's time to see our research in action. Here we can see the earnings growth chart for Circo. These lines show how earnings forecasts have evolved over time in any given year. We've plotted these lines from 2020. This is what we want to see, earnings forecasts moving upwards over time.
That is the earnings momentum part of our investment process. Good momentum usually speaks to a good management team who has strong enough visibility, usually because of a good business model, who are able to consistently under-promise and over-deliver. As many of you know, going out and meeting management is a core part of our investment process. Indeed, with Circo, we've not only had countless meetings with their management team and Chairman to discuss things like strategy and management transitions, we also have such a strong relationship that in 2023, I was invited to present to their finance leadership team about how financial reporting and presentation could be improved in the business to make it easier to analyze, and more important, easier for the market to value. We are long-term investors, and we think this collaboration is really important.
Whilst meeting management is important, it's often far more interesting to meet the next few layers down. Here, this picture on the right shows me driving a defense-grade tugboat on the Solent, out learning about one of Circo's largest contracts. Here, they provide boat services to the Navy, think tank refueling and tugboat services to big warships and aircraft carriers. In this picture, Captain Bob is instructing me to avoid crashing into all the high-value yachts in that marina. I learned a lot that day about the dominant position the company has as a single-source supplier in that space and the high margins it can make from such contracts. I also learned how to keep an incredibly straight face while asking Bob, the captain, all tug-related questions. What was the hardest tug he'd ever experienced? What was the going rate for a tug in Portsmouth?
It was a total tug fest and an all-round excellent day out. I hope this gives you a sense of what we're looking for in investments: undervalued growth. Here, I just wanted to show you our top 10. It makes up about 30% of the portfolio. It's made up of a mixture of UK house builders, defense businesses, domestic pub companies, challenger banks, and aggregates business, and should give you a sense of the diversified exposure that we have. To follow on from this, here's a top-down view of our fund. We construct the portfolio from the bottom up, so this is really an outcome rather than an objective. What you'll see here is that 40% of the revenues of the portfolio come from overseas, and we also are exposed to a diverse range of sectors.
As you would expect from a fund focused on growth, we have large weightings in industrials and tech sectors, while we run smaller weightings in sectors such as consumer staples. You can also see our GARP style and 4Ms investment process shine through in our portfolio characteristics. This table, which you can peruse in your own time, you will see that historic sales growth and earnings growth are faster than the benchmark, and the business is generating higher returns and more prudently capitalized than the benchmark, trading on a similar multiple to the benchmark. We're getting all those characteristics for all those better characteristics for a similar multiple. Finally, onto dividends. People don't usually associate small-cap investments with dividend growth, but this chart should really make you think again. The chart shows you two important things.
Firstly, even though the overall dividend you would have been paid as an investor would have been low compared to an equal investment in the FTSE All-Share in 2005, our 4Ms process, which seeks out growth companies with strong cash generation, means that our companies often pay growing dividends and that over time, the running yield on an equal investment in 2005 in our Trust versus the All-Share is over two times higher than the All-Share. Secondly, it highlights one of the unsung benefits of investment trusts, which is that they can smooth dividend payments. For Henderson Smaller Companies, this has meant that when many companies were cutting their dividends in the wake of the pandemic, our Trust was able to grow its own, whilst the All-Share saw a 25% overall cut.
Now, this is a really important slide, and I want to talk to you about what we've been up to this year. It's important because essentially what we buy and sell is what drives the performance of the Trust. I alluded to the difficult performance we've seen in recent years, and we've done the analysis on this. We concluded that, number one, we were not alone in suffering from underperformance. Our peers have seen similar too. We also knew that our growth style, which has deeply underperformed value in this time, has been a factor. Stock picking has been partly to blame. Our conclusions were that what we had been adding to the portfolio was performing, so we had not lost our ability to pick good stocks. It was the stocks that we failed to sell or held on for too long, which hurt performance.
This is why there's been a renewed focus on the desk on going back to basics, reassessing our investment thesis, and employing a stronger sell discipline, where the outlook has changed or there's been thesis drift. On top of regular capital recycling, under the new team, we're undertaking a series of refinements to the investment process. What exactly are they? Firstly, cutting the tail. We've talked about that. Not only is this a more effective use of time, but running a shorter list will again force that tougher conversation around capital recycling. Secondly, we're trying to increase the earnings momentum in the fund. You can see that in the purchase of funds platform provider AJ Bell and financial software provider Alpha Financial Services, which are both seeing unique tailwinds to earnings growth. We're also looking to further diversify our sector exposure.
When I looked at the fund earlier in the year, I was very conscious that I didn't want the fund to look like a one-way bet on improving industrial activity or a turnaround in UK house building and construction. Even though there are some very compelling opportunities in that space, my view was that we potentially had too much of that same exposure. I've tempered that and added to new exciting positions such as Genius, Pinewood Technologies, and Baltic Classifieds, which give us still good growth but differentiated end-market exposure, whether that's Porcine and Bovine Genetics in Genius or exposure to Online Classifieds in the Baltic regions. Finally, I wanted to reduce exposure to companies with high financial leverage on top of high operating leverage.
There's a point in the cycle where you want to own these companies, and we don't think now is that time, which explains our disposals of companies such as Synthema, Vedendum, and Midwich. I am pleased to say that in aggregate, these buy and sell decisions have been accretive to our performance, and our new portfolio should give investors more diversified growth exposure going forward. You might be sitting here and listening thinking, gosh, she's done a lot this year, but I really wanted to reassure and say no. We have not ripped the heart out of this fund. Turnover in the last six months to June was only 15%. Annualized, that's 30%. Still low in the context. Our fund has an average four to five-year holding period, which equates to turnover of 20 to 25%.
Only slightly elevated versus our long-term average, and really not elevated at all given how low turnover has been in the last few years. Now, onto the asset class. As I mentioned previously, it really has been a lost decade for UK small caps, starting with concerns around the EU referendum, the political chaos that ensued, the energy crisis, and runaway inflation, and a rate tightening cycle which has done no favors for the UK economy, which is one of the most rate-sensitive developed economies in the world. From the end of 2021, and essentially the start of the rate tightening cycle, UK smaller companies have not only delivered paltry returns, but have underperformed the FTSE 100 by over 36%. Why stick with us and why stick with UK equities? The UK equity market is cheap. That is very well documented.
The market trades at a big, so over 30% discount to developed markets, even on a sector-adjusted basis. The more domestic FTSE 250 and small caps are the cheapest and sitting well below their historic averages. We know why this is the case. Inflation is still high, and whilst growth is fine, need I remind you that we are the fastest growing economy in the G7, it is slowing, and the market believes that we don't have the fiscal headroom in this country to stimulate that. We understand the push factors, and I will acknowledge that we are in for another autumn of speculation into the budget, which has been set for the 26th of November. We think the pull factors are coming into view. The Labour government have been clumsy, but what they have done, they've done three really important things.
Firstly, they've reset our trading relationship with our largest trading partner, Europe. Secondly, they've moved to deregulate the financial services sector, supporting domestic growth through lending in this country. Finally, they've committed to reforming the planning system. All this should stimulate domestic and foreign investment into the UK, including the stock market. We think that at a time when U.S. exceptionalism is being questioned, UK exceptionalism is abating, and that there's money to be made from this. What will get the markets moving? Firstly, it's confidence. Both corporates and consumers in this country are sitting in a lot of cash. They just need to be confident enough to spend it. The budget could be a clearing event for that. We think, and we know it was a disaster last year, but we think expectations are coming from a different starting point.
Last year, investors and businesses were optimistic about a new government, but the government had a vested interest in talking down the economy to lay the groundwork for black holes. This year, according to some surveys, business confidence is at rock bottom, and Labour need to talk up the economy. We must never forget that no one self-flagellates like the British, but we must also never forget that we have seen the UK market try to rally at various points in the last six years, and that investors are open to re-entering this market. What else would help? Falling bond yields. Powell looks to be pivoting, and we'll hear more on that later today, later this evening. Will the Bank of England follow?
The UK is one of the most rate-sensitive economies, and if interest rates fall, the more domestic 250 will rally much harder than the more international FTSE 100. Finally, flows, but we'll talk a little more on that later. We think that the UK's mid-cap space is primed for re-rating. It's trading below historic averages in terms of valuations and on earnings that are in a large swathe of our universe sitting at cyclical lows. If we don't notice that, others will. I'm almost bored of showing this slide because it just tells you that M&A is persisting in the UK. In our own portfolio, we saw bulk annuities provider Just Group recently be bid for, and we know that NIOX, Advanced Medical Solutions, and Global Data were in bid talks earlier this year. As I mentioned, there is a bidding war for JTC.
We see a lot of opportunity in the UK market. UK politics has become increasingly divisive, but the one thing that all parties agree on is that growth is what is needed to both calm the gilt markets and win the electorate over. We have a lot of exposure that would benefit from this renewed focus. Labour have made some big mistakes, but could these early losses have really saved their growth mission? Here, I've just pulled some headlines from the papers this year. The government is pushing regulators to stop standing in the way of growth. They've undertaken planning reform, and we've seen them take steps towards making it easier for first-time buyers to get on the housing ladder. This should help not just our own house builders, but also the building materials companies that we own.
We've also seen the government take tangible steps to deregulate financial markets, which would help our holdings in challenger banks such as Paragon and OSB. We've even heard Rachel Reeves talk about Trump-style boosterism. We have a diversified portfolio of stocks, giving you exposure to a variety of themes. Unlocking UK business and consumer confidence would benefit a great many of our holdings. Has the market woken up to some of the subtle but meaningful steps this government has taken? This flow chart here suggests that they have. This chart shows flows trends in UK equity funds, which is a good indicator of interest in our market. We know that the UK small-cap market performed very well in 2015, 2017, and 2021, the years where UK funds were in inflow.
What we can see in this thick orange line here is that in 2025, outflows look set to be abating, or at least certainly bucking the trend of the last few years. Whether that's people taking notice of UK government policy or Trump's liberation announcements driving diversification in people's portfolios away from the U.S., there is more interest in UK equities, and that is positive for our part of the market. UK equities make up less than 4% of the MSCI All-World Index. Just a 1% shift from U.S. equities into our market would be material for asset levels. Could this be the start of something? At the moment, this has started at the larger end of the market, but there is scope for it to broaden out, and historically, small caps benefit from this.
Given how oversold our part of the market is, it really won't take much to get it moving again. To finish, why us? We are an experienced team of small-cap investors. We have a long history of outperformance. We construct our portfolio from the bottom up with a view to giving you diversified exposure to high-quality UK small-cap growth stocks. With that, I will hand it to Dan to moderate questions.
Indri, thanks very much for your presentation. I'm Dan Howe, the Head of Investment Trusts at Janus Henderson Group plc. I'll be moderating today's Q&A session. To ask a question, please click on the speech bubble called Q&A at the bottom of your screen. We hope to answer all questions, but if we are unable to do so, we will respond via email afterwards. Please submit your questions now. Indri, we've got a question for you here. What sectors or themes have stood out as contributors to performance over the past year?
Over the past year, we can't ignore our large weighting to the defense sector, which has been a really strong contributor. The persistent geopolitical instability and the inability for Europe and the UK to rely on the U.S. for security guarantees has really increased demand and the willingness for governments to spend on defense, and that's helped our holdings such as Cohort, QinetiQ, and Chemring in this time. Other sectors that have benefited are some of our construction names. Everything from aggregates owner SigmaRoc, which is set to benefit from German fiscal spending, and Balfour Beatty, which I mentioned earlier, seeing strong demand in the UK. Because demand is so strong for infrastructure, this has allowed some of these companies to be choosy and only bid for contracts with attractive risk profiles and therefore higher margin structures.
It's putting them in a good space, not just from a revenue growth perspective, but also from a margin perspective.
Great. Thanks, Indri. Got another question. It's for you again, actually. How do you see the UK small-cap market evolving in the current economic climate? What could help turn the sentiment more positive? You gave a few bits earlier. Just give us a bit more color, if you could.
Sure. I guess in the short term, it really is the autumn statement. That's going to be a big hurdle for the UK small-cap market to overcome. The market will want reassurance that firstly, the fiscal hole Reeves has to fill to restore her headroom is not outsized. The market is looking for a number between £20 billion and £30 billion. We don't want it to be the £50 billion number that's floating around. The market will want to get comfort that there will be both a mix. This hole will be filled with both a mix of tax rises and cost cutting, and that it's really the taxes that aren't going to have an inflationary impulse that are being raised. Last year, we saw the controversial increase in national insurance rate hurt employers and really forced them to put prices up, which was inflationary.
If we get, say, taxes being raised through less generous pension tax deductions, that would not be inflationary. Like I alluded to before, corporates and consumers have really healthy balance sheets. We just need fiscal stability. They just want to understand the playing field that they're on to unlock some of these savings. On top of the autumn statement, any rate cuts will help. I've mentioned that before. In the longer term, the government will need to sort of show that it can sustainably improve its growth trends through supply-side reform to make that gilt market volatility go away. Credit to the Labour government, they are trying to do that. It is good that all political parties know that it is growth that they need to target here.
Thank you. Question for Indriyati again, actually. Given the headwinds in recent years, what makes you optimistic about the Trust's outlook from here?
Firstly, it's that the valuations are a really attractive starting point. Secondly, it's that we are in a rate-cutting cycle rather than a rate-rising cycle. You know, base rates falling is good for stimulating growth, and growth is good for small caps. The setup is very different. When we were coming out of 2021, small-cap valuations were elevated and rates were low and rising. Now, small-cap valuations are on the floor and rates are high and falling. That should help us.
Thank you. Could you just give us a bit more color? You talked about the team and the collaboration with the broader colleagues at Janus Henderson. Could you give us a bit more color as a sort of day in the life in terms of how you interact with them on a daily or weekly basis?
Sure. Usually, it's just swinging my chair around because I sit back to back with the UK income fund, and then I sit to my left next to the Pan-European small-cap team and to the right, the UK large-cap hedge fund team. It's brilliant because you just get different perspectives on the same stocks, which help you form your own view. If I don't want to be lazy, I can just get up and walk over and speak to our specialist property team that hold a great many of our own holdings in our portfolio, and we can compare notes and really draw on that specialism. It is just three of us making the final investment decisions, but there are lots of voices that feed into that.
On a weekly basis, on a Monday morning, we have a cross-asset, no, we have an equities team meeting, but we have members of the fixed income team come and give their short view on the week ahead and some of their longer-term thoughts. We have a sort of tour around the globe, and we get to hear about the most interesting things or important points happening in their equity markets. That's really important because even in the UK small-cap space, over 50% of the benchmark derives its revenues from outside of the UK. We can't just be looking inwards here. It's great to have that collaboration at my feet here.
Thanks, Indri. Question for Penny. Could you talk to us a bit about the discount on the investment trust and how that compares to peers and buybacks to date? You're on mute, Penny.
Sorry, everybody. We've been very active in the market over the past year, and we've bought in since the October 2024 AGM, so almost the last 12 months. We've bought in almost 11 million shares, which is just under 15% of the total share capital. All those shares that we've bought in are held in treasury. Our discount as a result of this has narrowed. The tightest discount was at just over 7%, 7.4% in mid-July this year. The discount yesterday was just over 9%, and that compares with our peer group average of over 10%. What we've seen over the last few months is that we are consistently one, two, sometimes more than that, percentage points within the peer group average. We're pleased with that position.
We increased our ability to buy back earlier in the summer, in July, and we have the ability to buy back in a further 15% of the shares. We've brought in just under 6% since the 1st of July, so we've got over 9% remaining. I stress that we remain in the market. We want to defend that discount, but we're also very well aware that what we want to do is grow this trust. I hope that gives you a little bit of a flavor about what we've been doing.
That's great, Penny. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that's all we have time for today. A big thank you to Penny and Indriyati for sharing their perspectives and to all of you for joining us ahead of the AGM. As a reminder, the AGM is being held at 11:30 A.M. on Tuesday, the 7th of October, at Janus Henderson's offices at 201 Bishopsgate in London. There will also be a Zoom connection for those who can't travel. For more details on how to vote your shares and attend the AGM, please visit the company's website. Thank you very much for joining us today.