Fidelity China Focus A-Dis-USD

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|25/04/2023

by Claire Liang
We like certain aspects of Fidelity China Focus, but we continue to have some reservations on the new manager’s investment capability in the large-cap China equity space. His investment process’s viability in this single-country strategy also remains to be seen. The strategy’s Luxembourg vehicle continues to earn Morningstar Analyst Rating of Neutral across its share classes.

Lead manager Nitin Bajaj took the reins of this strategy from Jing Ning on 30 Sept 2022. Bajaj is a capable Asian small-cap investor who brings 20 years of investment experience and has almost a decade of experience investing in China via Fidelity Asian Smaller Companies. While China has been a key alpha driver for his regional small-cap strategy, His experience in large-cap Chinese names, which remain the strategy’s main hunting ground, is limited. This manifested itself in our recent portfolio discussions, where we feel his stock insights in this space are not as strong as his insights in Asian small caps or relative to other China equity managers we hold in high regard. Bajaj’s workload also bears watching, as this strategy shares limited synergy with his regional small-cap portfolio. Reassuringly, he gets support from Fidelity’s deep investment resources in China, including the strategy’s comanager Alice Li and assistant manager Karen Zhou, who mainly help him in idea generation and company research. The firm’s dedicated 25-member China analyst team also provides Bajaj a broad coverage of the investment universe.

Bajaj invests with a value mindset and adopts a similar investment process here as his Asian small-cap strategy, looking for good businesses that are run by competent and honest managements with a significant margin of safety in the price. He is a hands-on investor and tends to avoid areas that he feels less comfortable with. For example, he exited life insurers and trimmed banks since he took over the portfolio because of their complex balance sheets. He is also very selective on internet names as he is skeptical about their accounting practices. While the process has yielded good long-term results for Bajaj’s regional mandates, his relatively limited experience with the Chinese large-cap space could be a hurdle for him in replicating his small-cap mandate’s success in this strategy. We’ve seen him include more smaller-cap firms and non-Chinese companies such as American memory chip maker Micron Technology into the portfolio, and the portfolio’s China stake has dropped from 94% as of September 2022 to 85% as of February 2023. The increasing inclusion of smaller caps partly caused deterioration of the portfolio’s liquidity profile, and we are keeping an eye on the strategy’s capacity management.

Performance has been strong over Bajaj’s short tenure, with the strategy comfortably beating both the MSCI China Index and its peers by large extent. While encouraging, it is still early days.
 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™The strategy shows promise, but some concerns remain.
To find out how Morningstar rates a fund click here.
Morningstar Pillars
PeopleAverage
ParentAbove Average
ProcessAverage
 
Morningstar Medalist RatingMorningstar assigns the Medalist Rating to funds that are qualitatively and quantitatively assessed through manager research and algorithmic processes. The assessment turns on three key “pillars” – People, Process, and Parent – that yield an estimate of how well a fund will perform before fees but after adjusting for risk.
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