The market expectation is kind of no one really have a crystal ball of what's

going to happen in the future, but the narrative in the market is that demand

is going to grow at an exceptional pace. But I do see a couple of risks in there.

The first one is really the return on those hyperscalers investment.

The other risk is competition. As you pointed out, the Chinese large

language model, uh, built up on cheap power, cheap electricity, cheap land and

cheap hardware producers because China. Yeah, the technology could be

generations behind. But once they get to a certain

technology level, the cost of producing those product is just significantly

cheaper as compared to the developed market.

Welcome to Merryn Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the

markets. I am Merryn Somerset Webb and this week

I'm speaking with Fiona Yang, a fund manager at Invesco.

She is the manager of the Invesco Asia Dragon fund.

On today's show, we talk about AI. We talk about Korea's volatile market

very AI exposed. We talk about India.

Cheap or not cheap. And why is it lost so much popularity?

And we talk for probably the first time on the show about the Australian stock

market. Fiona, welcome to Merryn Talks Money.

Thank you for having me here again right now.

You were in earlier this year and my goodness, a lot has happened since.

Um, and at the time we talked about all sorts of things, but one of the big

topics that we discussed last time and by the way, listeners, if you haven't

listened to the last one, maybe go listen to that one either before or

after. This one has had lots of interesting

stuff in it. I wanted to start by talking about

what's happened in Korea because it was already growing.

Get going! Great guns.

Last time we talked, it continued to silver and saw and saw based on a couple

of of major I related stocks. And then we had a little bit of a

stumble and now career as well. I mean, I was going to say 25% off its

peak in June. But on the day that we're talking, I

think that Kospi went up 70% even yesterday.

So this is very volatile stuff. And we're also hearing, um, about a lot

of very highly leveraged, uh, ordinary Korean investors or gamblers, I guess we

should say, who lost an awful lot of money by being, you know, having very

high margin debt and then being hit by falling share prices.

So, uh, so it's fascinating because it's exactly as you said, that front row seat

to eye. But it's also turned out to be very,

very volatile. Yeah, exactly.

That's a fantastic observation that you had, uh, on the Korean market.

I think we would take a step back. Quite a few things has worked out very

favorably for Korea over the past 12, 18 months.

You know, with a memory cycle boosted by demand is just a phenomenal.

This is one of the biggest supercycle that we have seen for stocks like

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. And on top of that, I think we had to

say the Korean government has done a fantastic job in boosting shareholder

return, doing the value up initiative in Korea.

It's a textbook sort of example that all the other countries should really look

up to for some of the holdings that we have in the portfolio, especially the

financials. They are boosting shareholder return

massively over the past few years, and they start to really focus on

shareholder interest and protecting minority shareholders interests and

giving us more voices in the boardroom. That's something that, uh, I think in

all of this data center, I sort of narrative that investors have forgotten.

And but I do see risk. There are two risk I see in the Korea

market. The first one is the concentration of

risk, as you correctly pointed out, with the participation of leveraged ETF.

I do think some of the retail investors might sort they just bought into a

product that, uh, give them a bit more return into this, uh, investor, into a

great company. But reality is, it's a much more complex

financial product they've got themselves into.

And that led to the capital losses. And then the other risk is really

earnings risk. Now the market is having super high

expectations what the memory price is going to be.

If you look at Samsung Electronics took preliminary result.

They delivered 19% 19 times increase versus two CU last year.

The share price is actually done post that result exactly because of this

expectation versus reality. Expectation of earnings growth is super

high to the degree that even fantastic earnings cycle.

Cannot that meet that expectation. Uh, also result in share price

volatility that we have seen from the peak.

Um, there's a I mean, everything you said about the changes in the Korean

market and the changes to shareholder democracy and the changes to regulation

driven corporate governance. I mean, that's what we saw in Japan in a

previous cycle, right? I still think ongoing in Japan, which is

interesting, so that Korean regulators can picked up all sorts of hints from

Japan. And that makes a great long term story

for the shareholders and the Korean market.

But nonetheless, in the short term, as you say, it is all about concentration.

So, you know, um, let's get high necks and, and, um, something are a huge part

of the market. And it's the same across the Asian

market, actually, if you think to yourself, I'm buying, um, emerging Asia

or I'm buying Asia, and you buy any kind of index or ETF product, you're actually

just buying huge exposure to a couple of eye stocks.

So that concentration is the thing that really matters if you're buying into any

kind of index product, which means that you really have to look in detail at the

second risk, which you bring up, that which is the supercycle and in memory.

And when you refer to it as a Supercycle.

I wonder what you mean by that and how long you think that cycle will last.

Because I think for for for old people, uh, old investors, um, have seen these

cycles go on forever and ever. One of the first things I ever learned

when I became a stockbroker in Asia was that these cycles tend to be shorter

than you think. It's best just to take a step back to

look at how we ended up here and above. Rewind the tape by 2 or 3 years ago,

what happened to the memory industry was actually we were in a down cycle.

If you look at Nand, which is uh, sort of Nand flash that is in deep loss

making as a result, even though the industry only have a few producers of

Nand, none of them was really expanding the capacity aggressively.

Similar for Dram, which is the other type of memory that goes into all this

AI products. This days, as I say, they have gone

through this commodity super up and down cycle.

Uh, in the prior of data center cloud, build out your, uh, and, uh, the

profitability has deteriorated very quickly.

For a company like SK Hynix, they have to really go to the market, uh, to raise

convertible bonds because the balance sheet was in deep trouble.

They were super leveraged. Uh, so they were not in a position to

expand CapEx. Um, all of this moving to where we are

today is we have this period of, uh, underinvestment by the major players in

the memory markets. And on the other side of demand, we

suddenly have I we had a genetic AI that just need a lot of memory to really

recall the conversation that you had with ChatGPT, with anthropic, with

Claude, so they can help you to do the task better from this point on.

So that demand surge is all expected from what all this investors as well as

memory producers perspective, uh, even 12 months back, that's why we ended up

with this shortage in supply, because the investment over the past couple of

years, as well as the sudden surge in demand.

So what has happened is really the shortage has just driven the prices of

the exactly the same products up phenomenally over the past few years.

Then the question is about when how long this cycle could last.

I think it could last for a couple of years because of this supply to come up.

We'll take time. You need to build the clean room.

You need to pre-order that equipment and put equipment in there.

But then does that mean the share price could last for 2 or 3 years at a very

high level? That might not necessarily be true,

because the expectation is already up there in the stock market is while

expectation versus reality, the expectation is already, uh, there's, uh,

sort of high demand that cannot be met. And, uh, the supply will not come up in

the next 2 or 3 years If we do see any sort of vacuum in the demand side of

things. Or supply could come up just faster than

they expected, because suddenly all these companies have raised a huge

amount of money, not just for the Korean ones, but also the Chinese competitor is

doing an IPO in the coming days. All of that could change the supply

dynamics quite a bit. Then it's about when does that price or

the customers buy the other day. You have a handful of hyperscalers

paying for these products. If they do see demand weakening slightly

and the supply is going to come up quite massively.

The bargaining chip going to go back from the money producers to the payers,

and we could see prices start to fall from this point on.

Yeah. Let's talk about demand that I mean the

supply conversations is slightly easier in a way isn't it.

Because you can you can see the timeline that is required, as you said, to build

the clean rooms, etc. but when you look at demand, the

assumptions for rising demand, uh, pretty pretty enormous.

Pretty enormous. There are all sorts of things that could

affect that, one of those being people changing the way that they use LMS at

the moment. At the moment, people are changing from

using the services provided by the big American hyperscalers to using Chinese

products, etc.. So there's lots of things that could

shift inside the demand equation. Yeah, absolutely.

I think there are. I mean, there are quite a few moving

parts in that demand equation. How I see, I think demand is here to

stay is just a question of how fast is going to grow.

The market expectation is kind of no one really have a crystal ball of what's

going to happen in the future, but the narrative in the market is that demand

is going to grow at an exceptional pace. But I do see a couple of risks in there.

The first one is really the return on those hyperscalers investment.

It is really, given the current sort of annual run rate of the revenue produced

by Open the Eye and Topic are not to mention, you know the that the pass

uncertain pass to what profitability the ROI of this hyperscale investment is do

questionable on this huge amount of CapEx.

We're going to see all we expect to see. So that's one risk.

The other risk is competition. As you pointed out, the Chinese large

language model, uh, build up on cheap power, cheap electricity, cheap land and

cheap hardware producers because China, China's yeah, the technology could be

generators behind. But once they get to a certain

technology level, the cost of producing those product is just significantly

cheaper as compared to the developed market.

So as the result, their large language model is actually priced at a fraction

of the cost of the leading, uh, edge model that we have seen in the Western

world. I was just having lunch with one my

friend who operates one of his own software company in the Asia region.

He talk about, yes, we just switch between the models, certain task we can

just use, you know, the 90% cheaper Chinese model and certain task, the most

advanced mass. Maybe we use the Western model.

And that's a perfect way out for us to both save on costs and really get to the

desired outcome for coding and etc., so that just the two risks that I have to

take into consideration, thinking about the demand and how quickly that demand

is going to grow from this point on. Yeah.

See, that's interesting that a lot of the demand assumptions assume that

everyone will always want to use the best model, but that's not really the

case, is that people will use the good enough model depending on price and

depending on exactly. Yeah.

Okay. So if you are now investing in this

region and you're looking at this concentration and you're looking at

these risks that we've just talked about, and I know that a lot of people

will say to, to you that the the big companies, the Samsungs and the high net

six out of that, they still look reasonably cheap.

But of course, that's the way cycles always work.

You know that, uh, you're supposed to sell these companies when they look

cheap and buy them when they look expensive, because that's how the cycle

works. So if you are an active investor, now is

the time to diversify away from those plays.

My guess, and start looking at companies that are not so much the picks and

shovels, but the companies that will benefit in other ways from using AI.

If you still going to talk about this as an eye trade, start looking at the

companies that will be able to use AI to improve their productivity, their

customer service, etc.. So you moving out from those pure plays?

Yeah. That's exactly.

You know, for active bottom up fund manager.

That's my job day to day. Um, so two angles I look at this one is

really, you know, outside of the I stuff within Korea, if you are a Samsung

employee, you get this huge bonus because you just negotiated to get 10%

of the company's OPG operating profit to be paid in bonuses.

What are you going to do with it? Can we do stuff on that?

What do we get people getting in the way of bonuses?

I mean, I've read about this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands

of dollars being paid out in bonuses to ordinary employees.

Well, it's the scale here. This is going to be massive.

I mean, people, the sell side the most bullish expectation is next year.

SK Hynix could pay could get to about 400, 450 uh trillion.

Uh Korean one. If you have 10% of that paid to the

employees, is going to be huge as a percentage of the country's GDP.

Of course, that's expected. I'm not saying we will get there, but

was that a huge amount of money? Then people will want to spend it.

They want to buy a house, they want to buy handbags.

And actually it's already happening. People are talking about the

insatiable demand for hand luxury handbags as well as jewellery.

In Korea, the department store is just packed.

If you go to the VCA in the morning, you'll have to get a Q ticket the first

moment it opens, otherwise you will not be able to visit it for the whole day.

You have to that cute. You have to cute.

Go in to get a ticket to go to one of the jewelry shops.

Yeah, right. Everyone should come to Edinburgh.

There's no queues outside our luxury shops.

I think they are going to do that. Absolutely.

But yeah. Holidays here.

I know employees, we're waiting. Yeah.

So those are the things that we expect to see.

We already start to see signs of that. But once that money get into the pocket

of the employees as exactly what they're going to do, they're going to go

overseas to travel as well. So we want to benefit from that.

I think the banks, you know, it's going to see an acceleration in loan growth,

the wealth management product demand for introduced by the banks.

And then also on the other side is uh, I CapEx going to benefit a lot of the

construction company in the country. So that's around, you know, within the

Korea, the secondary and tertiary beneficiary from the I trend.

And then outside of that is the point you raise about who got to uses AI

technology to really benefit structurally for the future.

So some of the winners that we identify is actually the internet space.

We like some of the game developers in China or in the region.

If you think about, you know, online games, how you develop in the past, you

spend millions of dollars trying to produce a content to make the AGI looks

absolutely amazing. That comes at the expense of hiring

thousands of programmers, graphic designers.

But now using AI, you can just make it so much simpler.

It saves the costs and really enhance the gameplay.

And you can even tailor made the products to every individual user have a

completely different gameplay. Was as a guy sitting next to me because

we just like different things. We want different experience in the

world, or a world that just increase the time span on the platform and lower the

cost. So some of the stocks that we have held

in the portfolio for a long time, uh, for the longest time, is just under

appreciated by this AI beneficiary, the, uh, thematic it can you give us the

names and tell us some of the details of some of the other stocks you're holding

in Korea that have exposure to these themes?

Right. So in Korea, uh, we own some of the

banks, like KB financial is one of the biggest bank, uh, in the region.

We also own, uh, Samsung Fire Marine is one of the insurance company that has

just seen uh, shareholder return being boosted and, uh, into the CapEx spending

cycle of the Samsung Group. We do, um, Samsung eon a it is one of

the captive sort of construction company for the Samsung Group that could

continue to cater to the company's future built out of their clean room in

the country. And then for the other thing, uh, about,

you know, the beneficiary of AI using AI technology.

We do like, uh, NetEase and Tencent in China.

They are the game producers in China. And because of the regulation that you

need to really publish games in China, it's not something that I can actually

do for you to to really negotiate with a regulator.

What sort of games can be brought to the market that still needs, that needs

humans and humans? Yes, exactly.

That much of Asia is now beginning to look relatively expensive.

So we've talked about Korea, and I know Japan is in your area, but that's not

the pure value play. It used to be India will come into India

in a little bit but expensive. And so Vietnam for example, used to be

so cheap isn't anymore. But China remains pretty inexpensive,

still a very unpopular market. Um, tell me about that from your point

of view. I think, unfortunately, China has just

been used as a funding source to buying into the AI hardware space, so that

China does have many of the popular holdings among Asia and emerging market

investors. When you think about investing in the

region, you usually own stocks in China because they are perceived as the best.

And now, with the funding flow coming out of this popular holdings and going

into Korea and Taiwan is just have depress that market value.

So people have just been selling their holdings in Chinese markets to buy into

and to the exciting stuff in Korea and Taiwan.

Exactly. I think that's definitely a play, an

important role in that. And if we look at the index composition

of MSCI China, there are a lot of internet names in there.

And many would argue, you know, for internet companies, maybe you need to

reinvest yourself, reinvent yourself to have a new business model to really

survive in the new I era. Maybe you want to increase your CapEx

spending. You need to have the most competitive

large language model so as to win. Really, um, as a result, is not so sure

whether those companies are still the leaders in the region.

So they get sold off because of the flow and the question mark of how they're

going to evolve themselves in this new technology world.

Yeah, but valuations reflect that. This is one of the few places in the

region where you can still say, well, I'm not definitely not overpaying

as a the contrary, investors, you know, when other people look away, we always

want to look more into it because there are a lot of gems in that market.

Uh, and investors are fixated on a lot of the macro issues about weak economic

growth or, um, sort of still underwhelming consumption data.

But you know what? There are companies that can actually

thrive in this macro environment. And it is extraordinary, isn't it?

What a small part of the indices the Chinese market takes up.

Definitely, definitely. I think I think it's more of the case of

how quickly Taiwan and Korea have gone up, and then the market cap of this mega

company, the concentration that they have in the Asia Index is mind blowing.

Yeah, yeah. Um, and back to concentration and be

careful what you buy. Right.

Um, all right. Let's look at India, which was

incredibly popular for ages. Everyone loved India.

And we were constantly being told you didn't need to worry about prices by

India because of the growth and exciting companies, etc.

and, um, and that's over. No one's interested in India anymore.

Fallen out of favor. Um, but I've recently taking a trip to

India. Yes.

So India is very interesting. One two years ago it was one of the most

popular country to invest seeing for the whole region.

And here we are is completely being put into the bottom of the jaw because it

doesn't really I mean, I stocks in there, you know, all this, uh, internet

company again, similar like the Chinese ones being questioned about their

survivability for the long term and the growth in the longer term.

Um, so I just saw this interesting time to definitely take a trip and visit our

portfolio companies and identify whether there are more interesting ideas.

I think the conclusion is still the market, despite the on the performance

versus everyone else is still expensive. Um, unfortunately is

valuation is something that, uh, that we can't get the hurdle over it, but

doesn't mean we can't own stocks in the market because they're still selected

parts of the market looks extremely, um, valuable for us.

And if you look at the gross compounding power of some of the portfolio company

is definitely impressive. So one of the my favorite in India and

during the trip is, uh, Shri Ram. This is, uh, non-bank financial company

operating in India for extended period of time that basically served to say,

the truck drivers helping them to get a second, give them a loan to get a second

hand truck. Uh, they also help, uh, the small

businesses, giving them some working capital loan and etc..

So the business has thrived over the past years because of the on the

penetration of the formal banking sector in the rural area of India.

They can really serve the underserved. Um, and it can grow in the market

because of, uh, the income of the, uh, the average people would go up.

They want to take up the formal jobs, they want to open their own small

businesses, and Shri Ram will be there helping them with a vast network across

the country and their personal relationship of their loan officer.

With that and customer, something the formal banking sector just cannot really

address to. And what impressed me this time round

where I met the, um, they actually have, uh, I mean, the biggest, uh, uh, one of

the biggest, uh, Japanese financial, uh, company investing in a huge chunk into

free Ram. That means that, um, the credit rating

for Shri Ram can, can really improve on the back of, uh, big parent company.

And at the same time, with the cheap capital support from the mUFG, they can

really see their, um, uh, funding cost to go down substantially in the years to

come. So we're talking about a business can be

supercharged for gross leverage into the growth of the India economy.

At the same time, in joining this, uh, expanding margin because of the lower

funding costs and is still trading at a reasonable valuation as compared to the

index as compared to the peer group. So this is exactly the kind of thing

active fund manager like myself tried to do going to market okay, it's expensive,

but that means there are no good company to invest in.

Now what about, um, Indian consumer stocks?

And one of the conversations that we have on this podcast a lot is about

population and demographics. And of course, whenever you look at

China and you look at consumption in the construction, etc., you have to worry

that with a falling population, there's all sorts of things to take into account

that you would never have thought of even a decade ago.

But while India's fertility rate has fallen, uh, and actually number below

replacement rate, isn't it? But only just it's still the population

is still growing reasonably fast. And so you would have thought that in a

with the fastest growing population and with, as you were just talking about

high levels of entrepreneurial and income entrepreneurialism and income

growth, the consumer stocks would do very well.

Yeah, exactly. So the angle that I go in with a

consumer stock, also, looking at the Chinese consumption trend over the past

decades is really, you know, which are the digital companies can cater to that.

So I visited a lot of the e-commerce as well as, uh, digital internet companies

in India trying catering to. There's, uh, sort of a rising, um,

middle income class. Uh, so one of the company I visited, uh,

is Michelle being the one of the leading e-commerce company in India.

But again, it's a valuation. I on the side of growth, I can

appreciate the growth that they have, the vast amount of opportunities that

they can catering to. But the valuation is still quite

demanding. Then the next layer that I look at, who

are the supply chain company, are really the company catering to that growth.

This is a portfolio company that we own for a while as well.

It's called delivery. As one of the logistics company that

deliver the parcels for me show they have about 50% of the market share into

metro parcels. And they also cater to the other

digital, um, uh, sort of e-commerce company across India.

On top of that, they also do full truckload services catering to the small

as well as media enterprises to help them moving from their products from one

place to the other place, and they are one of the biggest logistics operator in

the country. If you think about India logistics, they

are it's really amazing the pace of improvement that we have seen over the

past year thanks to Modi. His investment in the logistics space in

the country's infrastructure really helps companies like delivery to grow,

to improve their services at lower costs, at higher efficiency, so they can

take over market share of some of their competitors, as well as really enjoying

this growth of consumers wanting more products.

They want cheaper products. They want products at our doorstep.

Um, so this is something that we have been investing for quite a while, and we

are really glad to see them seeing acceleration in growth for exactly this

topic that we talk about. And at the same time, with that growth

compounding the valuation, the leverage, the operational leverage that they are

seeing, the business, uh, is a beautiful small business that we holding in there.

I suppose the thing that will always come up in conversation when you talk

about logistics and infrastructure in India is the energy problem, because

they are a net importer of of fossil fuels, and that does make for quite a

difficult environment at the moment. Absolutely.

This is a topic in every single meeting. When I was India, people talk about, but

I think the government has done a fantastic job.

They have shouldered a lot of that, um, energy price volatility away from the

um, customers and consumers. Of course, there's a questionable how

long they can do that. Uh, but how they managed it, how they

managed the inflation and they how they do coordinated monetary policies and

communication with the market definitely brought a lot of reassurance to invest

in the market. And I think the other angle to look at

is not just about the price of oil for any of this country, Asia or India in

particular is also about trying to build this energy independence.

So that's another topic that, uh, you know, as a team, we just really like to

delve into, um, how Asia can be more independent from global geopolitics or

energy crises for the next decade. What's the answer to that?

I think, you know, a lot of things have happened not just about the Iran crisis,

but what has happened. Uh, Russia, what has happened during

Covid time is the five years a lot of things have happened and all that taught

all the nations around the world is maybe over the past 30 years, all we

care about is operational efficiency or getting the cheapest future.

From this point on, we should look at independence.

We should look at having more of this stuff onshore.

So we want to invest in companies that really cater to that theme.

You know, the services company, the infrastructure construction company,

design companies, uh, help resources. Uh, infrastructure built out across the

region. Um, so some of the stocks are we look

at, um, Samsung, you know, we talk about that's, uh, one of the they don't just

cater to the, uh, Samsung cut to CapEx, but they also involve a lot of, uh,

energy resources, build out construction type of work.

So that could definitely benefit. Another one we look at Asean, Australia

is called Wall-E. This is uh design company, um, EPC

company to really help, uh, the global oil and the resources majors to build

out new projects. So we do see that in the future, there

will be acceleration in this, uh, capital spending cycle in energy as well

as, uh, resources space across the region.

Um, I suppose when we look at Asia, we always think of it as being entirely an

energy importing region. But it isn't.

There are there are quite a few net exporters in Asia, aren't there?

Indonesia for example. Yeah.

Absolutely. So.

Indonesia, Malaysia as well as Australia.

They are really not so dependent on energy importing.

They are the net exporters. Uh, but then again, where you have the

resources doesn't necessarily mean you can have a great handle cars, but you

might not play that very well. So the, uh, stock market performance of

all the three countries still varies quite a bit.

Um, I didn't know that you invested in Australia, actually.

Yeah. So for my team, we do have, uh, Asia

Pacific, uh, products as well, extra, um, products as well.

So Australia, uh, being sitting in Singapore is a place that I love to

travel to and see companies as well. Okay.

If you put the love to travel to bed first before the think, um, who doesn't

like Australia, right? I mean, just think about Sydney,

Melbourne and the Y in Perth. Nothing else you can ask for.

When I worked in Asia, I used to do, um, Sydney, Melbourne quite a lot as well.

Again, technically technically work, but nice to travel to.

Um, so what does the Australian market look like to you?

I mean, interestingly, I don't think that we have ever discussed the

Australian market on this podcast before.

So this is a First Vienna. Oh, perfect.

Um, the hi. My pleasure to touch that.

I think Australia is, uh, amazing market.

You know, if you rank a kind of, uh, capital return, shareholder return, uh,

this kind of stuff. Corporate Governance Australia

definitely ranked the number one out of the countries that I cover.

So structurally is just a very favorable environment for active stock pickers to

work with the company and really enjoy the shareholder return.

Um, and then if we look at the resources, which we talk about earlier,

uh, Australia being the energy as well as a resources net, uh, exporter in the

region, it definitely have a critical, critical role to play, uh, in the Asia

space. Uh, so that's definitely the go to place

for us if we do want to own some iron ore producers, or if we do want to have

more oil, gas, uh, in the portfolio, that's a go to place we would invest.

And then if you look at a short term, there are a couple of uncertainty in the

market, especially what the government is trying to address the housing market

issue over there. That brought some uncertainty because

household wealth is quite concentrated in housing.

But the government has introduced a few sort of, uh, anti negative gearing

policies to address what they perceived as all for the ability for the younger

generation. That's a housing problem that they, they

do want to address. That brought some market uncertainty

because banks is banks in Australia are hugely leveraged into the housing market

um in the country. And then, um, as a result of that.

The other issue is the consumer confidence.

As I mentioned, wealth is linked to property price in Australia because of

the expectation that housing prices are going to be soft.

So the consumer segment is not doing very well.

The spending continues, but the expectation is that, um, it's set to

soft, um, from this point on. So we can see structurally there are

definitely merit of investing in Australia, but it's just temporarily

because of the housing crisis the country sees, they want to address it

for the longer term benefits of the country's healthy growth.

That might have set back some of the near-term growth potential for

Australia. So for the moment, the most interesting

stocks there are probably commodity related.

Yeah, definitely. We think, um, you know, if the data

center going to be built out as planned. They need a lot of copper.

Uh, where? Australia do have quite a couple of

names that have, um, exposure in that space.

And then the energy security wing in Wally that's in Australia.

They don't just, uh, cater to Asia to do the resources and energy build out.

They do have 50% of the revenue coming from the US.

That's a market that just have a huge plan to expand the gas producing, uh,

capability. So all of that just, uh, give us a lot

of options to invest in Australia. I don't know, Fiona.

Thank you. That's that's so interesting.

And as I say, a first off, we're going to do more Australia thanks to you

because there's obviously a lot going on.

Um, it's important that I let you go. Let me just ask you one question.

Is holiday time right. And all of our guests and, uh, uh,

listeners are headed to the beach, and we are wondering when you head to the

beach or wherever you're going. Um, I should say I am already on

holiday, but I like your show, so I fly. Come fly it to the here to London to be

on the podcast. So I say, sir.

Thank you so much for joining us. It's great to be here.

So I was in Sweden with my family. I brought my two kids and then together

was a bigger family. So we have, uh, we rented out a

beautiful house by Swedish Lake is just a tradition that people goes to the

lakes and enjoy the summer. And the kids can swim in the.

In the lake was absolutely beautiful. Not as hot as here, which is great.

But this is so interesting. I am hearing a lot of people saying that

they are holidaying and I. But someone told me that they were going

to Finland on holiday and a lot of people are going to Sweden.

It's escape the heat, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.

Now you are. You recommended?

Okay. Thank you.

Now you have kids, so you probably don't have much time for this.

But what are you reading when you're sitting by the lake?

Oh, quick question. My younger one is only one year old.

So you're not reading. You are not reading it all the time.

Um, so one of the book that I'm reading now is The Coming Wave.

That's really good. Talking about I.

And then, you know, not just about I, how are we going to change the world by

some of the consequences that you have to think about, like ethics, what it

means for job market, etc.. I know I shouldn't care, shouldn't be

too occupied with work while I'm away on holiday, but it's really the only time.

You know, with two young kids, the only time I can really spend to do some

reading. Uh, so that's something that I highly

recommend for this. I thank you, and we all hope that when

you finish reading that, you'll read a nice holiday romance or something like

that to finish things off. Yeah.

Thank you, thank you. I like to thank you so much for joining

us. I really enjoyed talking to you.

As usual, I thank you.