Baillie Gifford has seen its assets under management drop by £122bn in three years, but business is robust enough that total staff and partner numbers have risen during the period.
Figures disclosed by the firm to FT Adviser revealed the fund house, whose growth style of investing has been largely out of favour with investors, showed total assets under management of £352bn at the end of the first quarter of 2021.
This compared with £230bn at the end of the first quarter of this year.
The weighted average annual management charge for the equity funds run by the firm is between 0.5 and 0.6 per cent.
Taking the lower of that figure, it represents a revenue drop for the business of around £750mn this quarter compared with three years ago.
FT Adviser previously reported on Morningstar data which showed for the month of January 2022 the company’s assets under management shrank by £30bn due to a combination of outflows and market movements.
Baillie Gifford is owned by its partners, most of whom are fund managers, and the company disclosed to FT Adviser the number of partners currently stands at 57, having been 47 in the first quarter of 2021.
The firm employed 1,816 people at the end of March 2024, compared with 1,488 people at the end of the first quarter of 2021.
The firm opened an office in China in 2019, this office remains open.
The company is known for its focus on growth equities in areas such as technology and biotech, with those mandates run by the global alpha and US equity desks.
The company confirmed to FT Adviser that the US desk, which is jointly headed by Tom Slater who runs the company’s Scottish Mortgage investment trust, has assets under management of £15.85bn at the end of March 2024, while the global alpha desk has assets of just over £36bn.
Among the funds to suffer the starkest outflows over the period are the Baillie Gifford Japan fund, which had outflows of £1.3bn in the three years to the end November 2023.
The company said it never measures its success by the level of assets under management or sets itself targets to grow assets under management, and instead focuses on “looking after clients and becoming better investors".
david.thorpe@ft.com
