Maria Negrete-Gruson
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 of a company’s balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows focuses on identifying historical drivers of return on equity. The team’s strategic analysis examines a company’s competitive advantages and financial strength to assess sustainability.
The team believes a disciplined risk framework allows greater focus on fundamental stock selection. The team incorporates its assessment of company-specific, sustainability and macroeconomic risks into its valuation analysis to develop a risk-adjusted target price. The team’s risk-rating assessment includes a review of quantitative and qualitative ESG factors and country-appropriate macroeconomic risk factors to which a company is exposed.
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 for a company based on its assessment of the business’s sustainable earnings and 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.
