Baillie Gifford

Baillie Gifford has been in business for 97 years and is one of the leading privately owned investment management firms in the U.K.

Our structure combines the best of broad experience and international comparison. Whilst our 68 investors travel around the world to unearth prospects, our single investment location in Edinburgh offers the opportunity to compare and contrast opportunities with colleagues. We manage a variety of international portfolios for Canadian clients and have recently launched a concentrated global capability managed independently of index benchmarks, over a long timeframe.

Baillie Gifford has been one of the success stories of the investment management industry in the last 20 years. In a period where expansion through acquisition has been an industry trend we have managed to expand purely organically, growing funds under management and advice from just over C$2 billion in 1985 to over C$84 billion today. It is a growth that has been built largely on the simple foundations of good performance, good service and low staff turnover.

Independent ownership allows Baillie Gifford to focus on the key areas of investment performance and proactive client service. The partnership structure fosters stability and continuity in our people and investment process. As investment management is Baillie Gifford's only business, we have no conflicts of interest which gives clear focus on our clients' needs. The investment departments operate model portfolios and no single manager is wholly responsible for any one client portfolio. This ensures that we have a steady flow of ideas and also provides for additional controls.

Baillie Gifford has a rigorous and disciplined philosophy and process. We believe that all investment managers have access to the same information but what differentiates Baillie Gifford is what we do with this mass of information and how we make use of it. We have set up our own framework of analysis to process the information. The following primary company factors are examined in forming our judgments: industry background; competitive advantage; financial strength; subjective view of management. We believe that our focus on the quality of individual businesses has added the most value for us in stock selection over time. Not only has it helped us to produce steady returns from superior stock selection - and we feel this to be a more reliable source of return because it is based on hundreds of separate decisions - but it has also alerted us to macroeconomic problems. We place a strong emphasis on fundamental research and have an extensive program of meetings with company management which brings us closer to the story behind the numbers.