HESTA

• By 2025, according to industry executives surveyed last year, there will be fewer than 50.
• I’ve examined the issue of fund scale with Scott Lawrence, an investment manager with 35 year’s industry experience.
• Our conclusion: funds, large and small alike, succeed or fail depending on how well they formulate and execute their strategies.

Managing assets in-house

• For example, UniSuper (the higher education industry fund) manages 70% of assets in-house.
• AustralianSuper, with more than double UniSuper’s assets, manages 53% of assets in-house.
• This can be cheaper than paying fees as a percentage of assets to these external providers.

Investing in big-ticket items

• For example, AustralianSuper owns 20.5% of WestConnex, Australia’s biggest infracture project, having contributed $4.2 billion to the consortium that is building the mostly underground toll-road system linking western Sydney motorways.
• Opportunities like this are easier to access by large funds, and can help to diversify their portfolios.
• But such direct investment is costlier than buying shares and bonds.

Economies of scale and scope

• The third potential benefit is that size brings economies of scale and scope.
• Scale can reduce fees, by spreading the fund’s fixed costs over a larger member base.
• Economies of scope involve an organisation being able to improve or increase services, say by investing in better systems and more staff.

Size brings its own challenges

• Because they have more money to invest, they have more work to do in finding sufficient attractive assets to buy.
• The risk is they need to accept some assets offering low returns to do so.
• Whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and challenges ultimately depends on fund trustees and management doing their jobs well so that members benefit.

• By signing up to 40:40 Vision, Sims Limited is pledging its commitment to achieve gender balance by 2030 and putting diversity targets and plans in place to drive and embed this change across the company.
• This will include:
  Pledging to achieve gender balance ( 40:40:20 ) in executive leadership by 2030;
  Declaring medium and long term gender targets;
  Making plans public to employees, shareholders, investors and the wider business community; and
  Reporting annually on how they are tracking against targets.
• "Sims Limitedrecognises, and has been committed to, the business and social importance of achieving gender diversity," said Alistair Field, CEO and managing director at Sims Limited.
• "In fiscal year 2022, we met our goal to have 25 percent of our female employees in executive and senior leadership roles two years earlier than initially anticipated and achieve gender balance on our Board of Directors.

• Stack Capitals investment was part of the recently announced $117 million USD Series F funding which brought its valuation close to $2 billion USD and included Goldman Sachs Asset Management (NYSE:GS), G2 Venture Partners, SuRo Capital, Next 47, Stafford Capital Partners, HESTA, Newton Investment Management North America, Grays Creek Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Hercules Capital, Inc., BOND, and Scale Venture Partners.
• Locus has built an impressive platform of robotic solutions during the past several years and were extremely excited to invest into the business, said Jeff Parks, Chief Executive Officer of Stack Capital.
• Stack Capital is an investment holding company and its business objective is to invest in equity, debt and/or other securities of growth-to-late-stage private businesses.
• SC Partners Ltd. has taken the initiative in creating Stack Capital and acts as Stack Capitals administrator and is responsible to source and advise with respect to all investments for Stack Capital.

• The Locus warehouse execution platform disrupts large-scale warehouse fulfillment and distribution with an industry-leading, intelligent, and dynamically scalable robotics-driven solution.
• Locus delivers 2X-3X productivity by seamlessly coordinating both human labor and AMRs to dramatically improve order fulfillment efficiency and workplace ergonomics, while lowering operational costs.
• "Locus is clearly a winner in the flexible warehouse robotics space, and the consistency with which the Locus team has executed is extraordinary," said Zach Barasz of G2 Venture Partners.
• It took Locus 1,542 days to pick its first 100 million units and just 40 days for the last 100 million picks.