The JPMorgan Emerging Markets Investment Trust plc (JMG) invests in businesses with potential to be the next leaders in the emerging markets—and now has even more research power to find them.

Explore how JMG is enhancing its portfolio with fresh insights and strategic research capabilities to capitalise on emerging market opportunities. Discover the latest investment strategies and team developments driving growth

Coverage where it counts

The well-resourced J.P. Morgan Asset Management Global Emerging Markets (GEM) research platform got a further boost from the nine new research analysts that joined in the last 18 months. The research team’s ability to cover more stocks across emerging markets is helping the JMG portfolio managers find investment opportunities in countries such as India, where a growing and evolving market has significantly increased the number of investible companies. In addition to several analysts who are now just looking at Indian companies, JMG will also benefit from additional analysts supporting the GEM Fundamental investment team led by Austin Forey.

Adding emerging ideas with room to grow

JMG’s core investment process seeks to find great businesses, avoid overpaying for them and hold them as long as possible. Roughly 25 stocks account for 75% of portfolio; the remaining 25% is a long tail of smaller positions in interesting ideas.

Some of the recent additions to smaller companies already reflect the increased research capacity in Indian stocks, including a rapidly growing Indian IT services business and an Indian insurance aggregator. One new position in an Asian regional shipping specialist charts new territory for the portfolio: JMG has never owned a shipping company before but the investment team was impressed with the management team, an important criteria in emerging market investing. Another new small position is a Taiwanese producer of uninterrupted power supply equipment.

The portfolio management team continues to find many interesting ecommerce and digital businesses, such as Trip.com, China’s leading online travel company and Tencent Music, which is similar to Spotify. These asset-light businesses enjoy low costs for adding new users on existing apps, resulting in strong conversion of profits to cash generation. These companies also benefit from natural network effects that drive users to successful platforms and create dominant players within industries.

Long-term positions drive performance

Consistent with JMG’s long-term investment strategy, the top holdings in the portfolio have not changed much over the past year. These positions have contributed to a long-standing bias towards consumer-related businesses, information technology companies and financials.

These large positions also drive much of the portfolio’s performance. For example, online retailing giant Mercado Libre is the top active position in the portfolio and was the biggest contributor to JMG’s performance this year to 31 May 2025. BBVA, a bank listed in Spain that has 80% of its business in Brazil and Mexico, was the second largest contributor to returns. Several other financial stocks, including Mexican bank Grupo Financiero Banorte, and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, have also been top contributors recently.

While the portfolio holds large positions in some technology stocks that have been performing well in recent years, such as TSMC, the large active position in Tata Consultancy Services, an Indian IT services company, has performed poorly this year due to weaker US corporate services demand. JMG’s large position in Infosys, another Indian IT services company, has also been impacted by the same trend.

JMG has long maintained less exposure to commodity-oriented sectors, such as energy and materials, where it can be more difficult for companies to differentiate their businesses and governments often have some level of ownership.

Market and macro impacts

JMG’s country exposure is driven be underlying stock selection, although market movement can play a role. Strong performance from Indian equities, for example, has increased India’s weight in the MSCI EM benchmark, reducing the size of JMG’s overweight position.

Similarly, JMG has been very underweight China vs. the benchmark, but this gap has narrowed with the decline in Chinese equities. Despite this challenging backdrop in China, five of the top 10 contributors to returns this year are from Hong Kong and China.

The ongoing high level of macroeconomic uncertainty will likely continue to move markets and JMG will continue to take more risk at the stock level vs. country level.

Looking ahead

Over the long term, stocks of higher-quality businesses tend to outperform lower-quality stocks. However, over the last few years the opposite has often been true, which has been challenging for JMG’s investment process.

Recently, the environment for emerging market equities has been shifting, in part because the US dollar has been weakening on concerns about the strength of the economy. Typically, emerging market equities benefit in this environment—even though it is not necessarily positive for all industries—because investors start to look for opportunities outside of the US.

At the same time, valuation declines across a broad range of stocks in the emerging markets allow JMG to invest in quality companies while paying less for them.

The JMG portfolio management team is confident that the trust will be able to capitalise on this supportive macro and valuation backdrop, using its increased research resources to identify the most attractive new investment ideas for the portfolio.

Summary Risk Indicator

The risk indicator assumes you keep the product for 5 year(s). The risk of the product may be significantly higher if held for less than the recommended holding period

Investment objective

This Company aims to maximise total returns from Emerging Markets and provides investors with a diversified portfolio of shares in companies which the Manager believe offer the most attractive opportunities for growth. The Company can hold up to 10% cash or utilise gearing of up to 20% of net assets where appropriate. Gearing may magnify gains or losses experienced by the Company.

Risk profile

• Exchange rate changes may cause the value of underlying overseas investments to go down as well as up.
• Investments in emerging markets may involve a higher element of risk due to political and economic instability and underdeveloped markets and systems. Shares may also be traded less frequently than those on established markets. This means that there may be difficulty in both buying and selling shares and individual share prices may be subject to short-term price fluctuations.
• Where permitted, a Company may invest in other investment funds that utilise gearing (borrowing) which will exaggerate market movements both up and down.
• External factors may cause an entire asset class to decline in value. Prices and values of all shares or all bonds and income could decline at the same time, or fluctuate in response to the performance of individual companies and general market conditions.
• This Company may utilise gearing (borrowing) which will exaggerate market movements both up and down.
• This Company may also invest in smaller companies which may increase its risk profile.
• The share price may trade at a discount to the Net Asset Value of the Company.
• The Company may invest in China A-Shares through the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program which is subject to regulatory change, quota limitations and also operational constraints which may result in increased counterparty risk.