Impact Investing in Emerging Market Public Equities: What it is and what it isn’t
Back in 2018, we met a publicly listed business in India that makes affordable insect repellents that helped protect families from malaria for 2 US cents a night. During a demonstration in their R&D lab, we were struck by the huge positive social implications of this company’s profit-driven development of an effective product at such […]
Women in India: how to get excited by slow progress
by Rebecca Lewis, Co-CEO & Partner Over the last decade or so I have had the pleasure of frequently spending time with our India research team, led by Vatsal Mody in Mumbai, often conducting ‘household visits’, basically sitting in someone’s front room chatting to them about their lives, spending and aspirations. Whilst we have had […]
China: Current state of play
Partners Desmond, Gordon and Hugo were all back in China in June, covering a total of eight cities between them in a comprehensive check-up on the economic recovery. The chance to get off the beaten track of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen was also a welcome reminder of the depth of the opportunity in China, and […]
The Consensus EM Long: Why it’s Right, Why it’s Wrong
So clear is the pundit’s case for emerging markets in terms of macroeconomic fundamentals at the moment – with stronger growth rates, a tighter grip on inflation, and even the ‘goldilocks scenario’ of a depreciating dollar – that we can understand if such a near-universal consensus long is beginning to be viewed with some skepticism […]
What is ‘real’ anymore?
A positive of the covid recovery in major developing economies (particularly India), which has seen them roar back to life, has been the normalisation of results for non-tech businesses which experienced a choppy pandemic as emerging market consumers stayed at home and some had to dig into their savings to survive. India’s leading apparel retailer […]
Hindsight 20:20 – what we missed during covid
When we look back on the COVID period, sitting behind desks and wondering what the future would hold, there was initially much concern about how we would do our job. As bottom-up investors, we have always had a strong belief that “whites of their eyes” conversations with management teams as well as building a 360 […]
India leads the way
As investors of high-quality growth stocks in emerging markets, through the first half of 2023 we have been bemoaning the late arrival of the green shoots of Spring in our corner of the world. In January and March, we wrote of our continued experience that earnings (the driver of returns for our holdings) were being […]
Our impact measurement and management framework in practice: IndiaMart
In a previous Insights piece, we described recent updates to our impact measurement and management (IMM) framework. Here we illustrate some of those using the case study of IndiaMart. IndiaMart Intermesh Ltd (“IndiaMart”) is India’s largest online business-to-business classifieds platform, with over 7 million MSME suppliers using the platform and 1 billion visits per year[1]. IndiaMart’s […]
Improving health outcomes in India: the importance of local context
With our focus on delivering impact at scale, over the past three years Arisaig has invested in a range of companies whose products and services contribute to people’s improved health and wellbeing. At last count, these reach over 300m people annually[1], which is an increase of 39% since 2022. We estimate that nearly 40%[2] of those […]
Female empowerment in emerging markets: more than sanitary towels
As discussed in this blog we have learnt a lot since we started researching how we might apply an impact strategy in emerging market public equities 5 years ago, and especially in the last three years since we launched our strategy. Back in 2018, one of the most exciting areas for me personally was looking for businesses […]
