Unlocking Swiss potential
You seek a doorway to the Swiss market leaders. UBP’s proven expertise and focus on value-creation can open it.
The Swiss equity market offers investors a unique blend of stability and growth. Home to numerous world-class companies across diverse sectors, Switzerland boasts a robust economy, a stable political environment, and a culture of innovation. Swiss equities provide an attractive combination of defensive characteristics and exposure to global growth opportunities, making them a compelling choice for investors seeking to build resilient portfolios.
The enduring appeal of Swiss equities
Switzerland's equity market presents a compelling case for investors:
- Economic resilience: The Swiss economy is renowned for its stability, reinforced by a strong currency and a highly skilled workforce. This resilience is reflected in the quality of its corporate sector, which includes global leaders across market capitalisations.
- Sector diversity: Switzerland is home to world-class companies in defensive sectors, such as consumer staples and healthcare, and more cyclical industries, including industrials and technology. This diversity provides investors with the potential to capture growth opportunities while managing risk.
- International exposure: Swiss companies generate a significant portion of their revenues abroad, often more than 90%, providing investors with diversified geographical exposure. This international orientation and a strong focus on sustainability position Swiss equities well for navigating global challenges.
- Attractive valuations: Despite their quality and growth potential, Swiss equities often trade at valuations comparable to or lower than their global peers. This presents an opportunity for investors to gain exposure to leading companies at attractive prices.
Our strategic investment approach
Proven expertise across Swiss equity market segments
At UBP, we have managed Swiss equity portfolios since 2006, applying our proven Cash Flow Return on Investment (CFROI, source UBS HOLT) framework. Our experienced team based in Geneva takes a selective approach, seeking to identify the most compelling opportunities across the market cap spectrum.
While the Swiss Performance Index is heavily concentrated in the three most prominent names – Nestlé, Novartis, and Roche – our strategies aim to capture the breadth of the market. We focus mainly on often-overlooked small and mid-cap stocks with the potential to generate attractive returns. Our investment process is distinguished by the following:
- In-depth fundamental research and high-conviction stock selection
- Consideration of companies' global competitive positioning, not just domestic peers
- Integration of top-down macroeconomic analysis with bottom-up stock-picking
- Emphasis on identifying underappreciated CFROI resilience and turnaround potential
This disciplined approach, consistently applied across our Swiss and global equity franchise, has delivered strong long-term results for our clients.
Find out how our innovative strategies can elevate your portfolio's performance.
Speak with our specialists today to explore tailored solutions.
Play our latest podcast episode
Swiss & global equity focus: dive into our latest episode on equities – insights, trends, and leaders.
Investing along the CFROI life cycle
Our investment team seeks to identify and invest in three types of stocks along the CFROI life cycle:
- Growth stocks whose potential is underestimated by the market
- Companies generating consistently high CFROI, able to "beat the fade" in returns over time
- Companies able to restructure in difficult times and showing the potential to return to growing CFROI
This investment philosophy, consistently applied across our Swiss & Global Equity franchise, has repeatedly demonstrated its alpha-generation potential as reflected in the track records of our strategies.
Our UBAM strategies
Discover our range of Swiss equity strategies:
"We continue to see a compelling rationale for investors, both in Switzerland and abroad, to gain exposure to Switzerland's equity market and value-creative companies."
Investors Insight
Frequently asked questions about Swiss equities
The Swiss market delivers one of the highest CFROI spreads, reflecting a high level of value-creation and explaining why Swiss equities outperform global equities over the long term. An allocation to Swiss equities has proven to enhance the risk–return characteristics of global portfolios over the medium to long term.
Swiss companies have high absolute levels of CFROI (like US companies), driven by diversified international revenue exposure, resilient business models, strong management quality, low debt levels, high R&D spending, innovative growth, and low ESG risks.
This is also supported by the solid Swiss macroeconomic and political background.
Swiss equities have marked exposures to defensive sectors (consumer staples and healthcare), with less dependency on cyclical industries (energy or mining). Nonetheless, Swiss equities have proven to participate fully in market uptrends, particularly driven by the small- and mid-cap space, a nimble beneficiary in economic recovery or growth periods.
Our active solutions deliver consistent performances especially in strong market years, given a differentiated and superior stock selection, the exposure to companies demonstrating high levels of value-creation, along with a flexible allocation away from the index’s heavyweights, particularly towards small and mid-caps that are showing improving CFROI levels.
CFROI (cash flow return on investment) is an indicator of a firm’s ability to create value. Technically, CFROI is the average level of internal profitability that is equal to a firm’s economic assets, taken as a gross total (i.e. before depreciation costs) and adjusted for inflation, and the series of gross surpluses after tax, calculated over the lifetime of fixed assets. The last of these is estimated by dividing the gross value of capital assets by the year’s depreciation costs. Compared to the average weighted capital cost, CFROI enables the calculation of the extent to which a firm’s cash flows are superior to its cost of capital.
The CFROI is also a means of assessment if one assumes that a company’s cash flows are a better indicator than its earnings (the price/earnings ratio), which are often subject to accounting distortions. It is used to compare the economic profitability of a firm to that of its peers, and its variation from one year to another gives an indication of its development. It is also interesting to establish a relationship between the CFROI and a firm’s share value; for example, if an investor believes that the heightened CFROI of a firm is badly reflected by its share price, they will exploit this assessment anomaly by betting on a rising share price.
Source: UBS HOLT
Meet the team
Since 2006, the experienced Swiss & Global Equity team, based in Geneva, has managed our Swiss equity strategies, applying its distinctive CFROI approach. This stable and dedicated team conducts over 400 research meetings yearly with companies in our investment universe to deepen its market knowledge.
Key facts and figures
- UBP's Swiss & Global Equity team has seen minimal turnover in key members over time
- All four senior portfolio managers are also analysts, actively involved in all strategies
- The team manages CHF 5.4 bn in Swiss & global equity portfolios, with CHF 2.2 bn in Swiss strategies
- Our Swiss Equity strategy is one of the largest actively managed, with CHF 1.7 bn in assets (as of April 2024)
Documentation
|
|
26.11.2024
Global equity insights for 2025
In their latest podcast, UBP’s Co-Heads of Swiss and Global Equity, Martin Moeller and Eleanor Taylor Jolidon, provide us with their insights into the equity space, and in particular global equities, as the year draws to a close and we move into 2025.
11.09.2024
Value-creators beat the fade
You might have heard about our Swiss & Global Equity team’s investment approach, which revolves around cash-flow return on investments (known as CFROI – Source: UBS HOLT) and the selection of companies with high and stable CFROI only for some of its portfolios. This is a measure that gives an indication of a company’s ability to create value.
26.04.2024
Swiss equities back on the radar
Following a relatively lacklustre performance in 2023 and the Swiss National Bank’s recent interest rate cut, is now the time to revisit the Swiss equity opportunity set? In this Investment Rendez-Vous podcast, Eleanor Taylor Jolidon, co-head of UBP’s Swiss and Global Equity team, walks us through Swiss business models, current valuations and industries of particular interest.
17.04.2024
Diversification is crucial, especially in 2024
As 2023’s concentrated market rally is extending into 2024, equity investors are worried about a potential consolidation or pullback.
12.03.2024
Why Swiss equities should be considered in every equity allocation in 2024
Investors may find the strong fundamentals and stable economic, political and social aspects of Switzerland attractive in terms of equity investments in a year which may be dominated by geopolitical newsflow.
02.02.2024
Monetary policy to give way to fiscal policy
UBP gives Allnews its latest economic and investment outlook for 2024, with Norman Villamin (N.V.), Group Chief Strategist, and Eleanor Taylor Jolidon (E.T.J.), Co-Head Swiss & Global Equity Franchise and Senior Portfolio Manager.