The investment team benefits from extensive emerging markets experience, continuity of its investment professionals and a rigorous research process.
The team seeks to invest in companies that are uniquely positioned to benefit from the growth potential in emerging markets and that possess a sustainable global competitive advantage.
The team believes that over the long term a stock’s price is directly related to the company’s ability to deliver sustainable earnings. The team determines a company’s sustainable earnings based upon financial and strategic analyses. The team’s financial analysis focuses on identifying historical drivers of return on equity, and our strategic analysis examines a company’s competitive advantages and financial strength.
We believe a company’s long-term direction and degree of change across multiple environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) metrics are important indicators of a company’s sustainable growth potential. Our sustainability assessment has incident-based and empirical components to evaluate a company’s historical, current and future potential behavior. We use a proprietary scoring system for the incident-based and empirical components of the assessment, which informs the team’s view of a company’s target price.
The team believes a disciplined risk framework allows greater focus on fundamental stock selection. The team incorporates its assessment of company-specific, sustainability and country-appropriate macroeconomic risk factors into its valuation analysis.
The team believes investment opportunities develop when businesses with sustainable earnings are undervalued relative to peers and historical industry, country and regional valuations. The team values a business and develops a price target based on its sustainable earnings and the team’s risk analysis.
Maria Negrete-Gruson, CFA, is a managing director of Artisan Partners and a portfolio manager on the Sustainable Emerging Markets team. In this role, she is the portfolio manager for the Artisan Sustainable Emerging Markets Strategy.
Prior to joining Artisan Partners in April 2006, Ms. Negrete-Gruson was the portfolio manager for DuPont Capital Management’s emerging markets equity portfolios. Before assuming responsibilities as portfolio manager, she was an international equity analyst at DuPont covering the developed Asia-ex Japan region. Earlier in her career, she was a foreign exchange trader for Banco Ganadero in Bogotá, Colombia. Ms. Negrete-Gruson holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and international relations from Universidad Externado in Colombia and a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia Business School. She is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.