Did You Know That You Owned These Amazing Companies?

Lifting the lid on your investment portfolio

Clients often ask us about their portfolio, how it’s invested, and what the returns have been. But we rarely delve into the actual companies and businesses that the funds hold.

As a result, it’s easy to feel a little disconnected and forget that you are an owner of thousands of world-class companies, doing amazing things in dozens of countries around the world.

So this month, we wanted to bring it to life.

Your portfolio currently holds shares in over 13,000 individual companies. Most of them you will never have heard of. But some of them are doing things so extraordinary that we felt they deserved a proper introduction. 

Here are five businesses you already own – and what makes each of them remarkable.

A Dutch company that every AI chip on earth depends on

ASML  – Veldhoven, Netherlands

In a small town in the Netherlands called Veldhoven, a company called ASML makes a machine that no one else on earth knows how to build.

It is called an extreme ultraviolet lithography system. It uses light with a wavelength shorter than a single strand of DNA to print microscopic circuits onto silicon, powering every advanced computer chip in the world. Every Nvidia GPU. Every Apple processor. Every chip powering the AI systems reshaping industry after industry. 

Each machine costs up to $400 million, is roughly the size of a bus, and ASML holds a complete monopoly on the technology. No other company has come close to replicating it, and none is expected to for at least a decade.

Without ASML, the AI revolution stops. Your portfolio owns a piece of it.

The factory that the entire technology world relies on

TSMC –  Hsinchu, Taiwan

Have you ever wondered how your technology actually works? Who makes the chips inside your phone, your laptop, and the AI systems being adopted by businesses everywhere?

The answer, in the vast majority of cases, is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company – TSMC. It doesn’t design chips. It manufactures them, to a level of precision that borders on the miraculous, for almost every technology company of consequence on earth. Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm –  they all depend on TSMC’s foundries. 

It’s the single most critical piece of manufacturing infrastructure in the global technology supply chain, and governments around the world are now paying it to build factories on their soil, such is its strategic importance.

A Taiwanese company most of your friends and family will never have heard of. Sitting in your portfolio.

The robot that has now operated on 20 million people

Intuitive Surgical – Sunnyvale, California

If you or someone you know has had keyhole surgery in recent years, there is a reasonable chance a robot was involved. That robot almost certainly came from a company called Intuitive Surgical.

Intuitive makes the da Vinci surgical system – a robotic platform that allows surgeons to perform highly precise procedures through tiny incisions, reducing recovery times and improving outcomes for patients around the world.

In January this year, the company announced that more than 20 million patients worldwide have now undergone surgery using a da Vinci system. In 2025 alone, over three million procedures were performed globally – an 18% increase on the year before. 

From cancer surgery to routine gallbladder removal, robotic-assisted surgery is moving from specialist centres into everyday hospital care, and Intuitive Surgical is leading that transformation.

A genuine revolution in how medicine is practised. Already in your portfolio.

The Danish company powering the energy transition

Vestas Wind Systems – Aarhus, Denmark

On hillsides, in deserts, and out at sea across 88 countries, wind turbines are generating clean electricity for hundreds of millions of people. The majority of them were built by a Danish engineering company called Vestas.

With more than 200 gigawatts of wind turbines installed across 88 countries, Vestas has installed more wind power than any other company in the world. In 2025 alone, it recorded new installations in 36 countries – more than any other turbine manufacturer globally. 

This is not a technology of tomorrow. It is infrastructure that exists today, operating constantly and on an enormous scale, generating the energy that powers homes, hospitals, and businesses worldwide.

Not a bet on the future. A company already doing it, and already in your portfolio.

The world’s most extraordinary collection of luxury brands

LVMH — Paris, France

This one might surprise you.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton is the world’s largest luxury goods group and one of Europe’s most remarkable businesses. 

Its portfolio includes Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Bulgari, Tiffany and Sephora, among many others – 75 prestigious brands in total. 

The group recorded revenue of over €80 billion in 2025 – double what it was a decade ago. 

Its fashion and leather goods division operates at a 35% margin, a level of profitability that most businesses in any industry could only dream of.

What LVMH illustrates, beyond the glamour of its brands, is something important about how wealth is actually created in the world. It comes in unexpected forms, from unexpected places. 

Champagne and handbags, it turns out, have been one of the great compounding businesses of the modern era. And your portfolio has owned them all along.

The philosophy behind the portfolio

These five companies are just a small window into what a genuinely diversified global portfolio contains. 

Behind them sit thousands more – in industries and countries you might never have thought to invest in yourself, doing things you would never have known to look for.

And behind every single one of those companies are real people. Engineers, scientists, surgeons, designers, and entrepreneurs turning up every day to build something, solve something, make something better than it was before. 

They are creating products that improve lives, generating profits, getting better at what they do – and sharing the rewards of that effort with you as the provider of the capital that fuels their ambitions. 

That is what it means to be an investor. Not a spectator watching numbers move on a screen, but a part-owner of human endeavour on a genuinely global scale.

This is, in our view, the profound beauty of owning the whole market rather than trying to select its best parts. The stock market is the greatest wealth-creating machine the world has ever invented. It channels human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and innovation – from a wind turbine manufacturer in Denmark to a surgical robotics pioneer in California to a chip manufacturer in Taiwan – into returns that are accessible to ordinary investors at remarkably low cost.

You don’t need to identify the next great business. You don’t need to predict which industry will define the next decade. You simply need to own a broad enough slice of the world’s productive capacity, hold it patiently, and let the extraordinary companies inside it –  most of whose names you will never need to know – do what they do.

That is what your portfolio is doing. Every single day.

If you’d like to discuss any aspect of your portfolio or the underlying companies it holds, just drop me a note.

Graham McCulley

Investment Director