Hi, my name is Kimberly West, and I'm a senior client portfolio manager at Invesco for the select equity team. And really, really appreciate Devin and Tom from St. Louis, giving us the opportunity to come in and talk to you today about our international companies fund.

So if I go to the next slide, our team runs about five and 1/2 billion. Today, we have nine investment professionals and our investment professionals have 15 years plus of average experience.

If you look at our strategy, one of the things that really-- are the couple of the things that really differentiate it, is that it is a high active share portfolio. We target significant outperformance over market cycle.

So this is a high conviction portfolio. What that means is it's concentrated. We're typically going to hold 30 to 45 names. Today, we're in the low to mid-30s. And we think there's real benefits to concentration. It means that we can make fewer, better investment decisions. We can know our names inside and out and that's what gives us the fortitude to hold names, especially in challenging periods like we're seeing in the market today.

We also want to make sure that we're flexible and we don't have to marry the benchmark, we're benchmark agnostic. We think a lot of those constraints that often managers put in place limit alpha generation. So what we want to do is not be forced to own countries or sectors that we don't think are attractive.

We also are long-term investors. We want to find great high quality businesses with predictable earnings growth and invest in them over the long-term and we do incredibly thorough independent research. Typically, I'd say when we're looking at a new idea, it takes us two to three months just to do the initial research. So that's just a little bit about I think what differentiates our team.

If I spend a minute and just talk about the team, so the lead portfolio managers on the international companies fund are Matt Peden and Jeff Feng, and they've worked together, managing this portfolio since November of 2009. And I think everyone on this team brings some very unique insights.

If you look at Matt, he's based in Atlanta. So again, we take a global perspective on every company, and so he has some unique perspective being located here in the United States. Jeff Feng is born and raised in China, he's based in Hong Kong for us and I think that gives him a very unique perspective. In fact, about 70% of the emerging market companies are based in Asia. So having boots on the ground is just-- we believe really helps us.

Han Chen also located in Hong Kong. She was also born and raised in China. Andrew Herron also located in Hong Kong for us. He was actually born and raised in the US, but fluent in Mandarin. Neeraj Khosla, actually born and raised in India, which again I think gives him some very unique perspective. He covers Southeast Asia and Africa for us. Carla Robinson was not born or raised in Latin America or Eastern Europe, but has probably one of the most extensive networks I've seen in those regions.

Andrea Salsiri spent a pretty good amount of his youth in Europe, so that gives him some unique perspective covering Europe and Australia. You also might notice that he has a risk designation. So Andrea has worked with Invesco risk team to basically help create the risk tools that we use to help us make better decisions in the portfolio. Natsuko Douglas joined us about a year ago. She used to work with Jeff and Carla, and Natsuko is based in Japan. And again, we think there's a huge benefit to having boots on the ground in Japan because it's a tough market and most of the companies there don't speak English or Chinese. And so again, having somebody who speaks the language, lives in that area has been a very big benefit. And then Ryan Buckley joined us also over the last year to cover the US and Canada.

And while we don't invest in all of these markets, particularly we don't invest in the US, we think it's important to have a global perspective when you look at companies because all of these companies today are global. And it doesn't really matter where they're domiciled, it matters where they're generating their revenue. And again, we think having a global perspective helps us.

If I go to the next slide-- So let's talk about where we're finding opportunities and how we're positioned. You might notice here that we're quite underweight some of the cyclical sectors like energy, and materials, and financials. And for us, we want to buy really high quality businesses with great management teams and buy them at an attractive price. And when we say high quality businesses, we want companies that have predictable earnings growth, we want companies that have a sustainable competitive advantage.

And we find it very challenging in the commodity oriented companies to find companies that A, have predictable earnings, they tend to be completely driven by the commodity price or B, have a sustainable competitive advantage. Even in financials where a lot of the benchmark is banks, we find it tricky because a lot of those companies we believe are having their competitive advantage challenged by fintech companies.

So we do tend to have big overweight in areas like consumer discretionary, communication services, industrials, but it's a pretty broad diverse range of companies if you look at these companies. Also, if you look at of how we're positioned from a country perspective, we're pretty overweight Asia-Pacific ex-Japan. We in particular, have a large overweight in China today.

Again, our overweight are not top down, they're driven by the bottom up, they're based on where we're finding opportunities. And on a relative basis, we're able to find more high quality businesses-- excuse me, at attractive valuations in China than anywhere else. We're at weight in Europe, but I would say that is growing right now. It's been challenging for us to find companies in Europe that have attractive valuations that are high quality, but the recent rotation from high quality growth companies into value cyclicals has created more buying opportunities. And we've absolutely been adding to some European names in the recent past.

Also, Japan on this slide, you'll see that we're slightly underweight Japan, but actually, we've been finding more opportunities. So more recently, we're slightly overweight Japan. So Japan is an area, again that from a pure macro standpoint may not necessarily look attractive, but we are able to find some really attractive businesses within Japan today.

If I go to the next slide-- This looks at our top holdings and also our characteristics. And certainly, we've spent a lot of time with Devin and Tom going through the portfolio, helping them understand how we're positioned, where we're finding opportunities, walking through the thesis behind some of our top holdings.

So just to give you a sense when you look at some of our largest holdings, Tencent is a leader in its space. It's based in China. It represents about a quarter of the mobile traffic in China today. It's got the largest gaming platform. It's number two in cloud, number one in social app. So this is an incredible business trading at a very attractive multiple from our perspective. So we continue to really like that name and it's-- as you can see, a very large weight in the portfolio.

Scout24 is a real estate portal. It's the largest real estate portal in Germany and it has twice the listings of its next largest peer. And so that's a company to us that's going to have tremendous opportunity for growth and incremental margins. Other names in the portfolio, Howden Joinery is in there. That is a company that's the largest kitchen cabinetry producer for builders in the UK.

And so another point that I would make is that when you look at our market caps below, we are truly in all cap find and we do have a small cap bias right now. And what we found is that a lot of the large cap names in Europe have looked quite expensive, but the smaller cap names have underperformed and looked a lot cheaper and we're able to find companies like a Howden Joinery, which is the number one kitchen cabinetry producer in the UK. And it's a small cap company, but really attractive. Scout24 is also a smaller cap company, but a leader in its space.

Other great names in our top five, Alibaba in China. You know clearly the leader in e-commerce in China and leader in the cloud. Eurofins, which is a leading company that does testing across the board, whether it's environmental testing, food testing, health testing, and they've actually certainly been benefiting from the uptick in COVID testing.

What you will notice is that, as I mentioned before, we want to find great growth businesses and high quality businesses. So we're willing to pay a bit more and you'll see that our PE is a little bit higher than the benchmark, but you'll also notice when you look at our growth and our growth is significantly higher than the benchmark and we're getting much higher quality. If you look at our tangible ROIC. You can see that the quality is a lot higher as well, and those are all characteristics that we look for. And absolutely, in our conversations with Devin and Tom, they really want to make sure that we're staying true to our process and that those characteristics line up with the things that we say we look for in companies.

So in terms of performance as I mentioned before, we've been running this portfolio since 2009. If you look at our track record and this page looks at rolling five year returns. So this says, how would you have done if you owned us over any five year period? And you can see that at least-- since we've been running the portfolio, we've pretty consistently been in the top quartile of our peers and ahead of the benchmark. In not only returns and rankings, but also risk adjusted returns. You also notice our up down higher than 80% of our peers. So what you also will notice is a significant drop off this year. And so I want to talk about what's been happening and what's been affecting performance this year.

This year, we came into the year quite overweight China. That was again, from the bottom up. It wasn't a top down call, it was just that we were finding more opportunities in China that were high quality at attractive valuations versus other parts of the world. And I would say we've always had an overweight to China. It's been a long period of time that we've been able to find great opportunities there, but that overweight certainly increased this year. What we didn't anticipate obviously, coming into this year was a lot of regulatory noise throughout the year. Also, the COVID creating a downturn in the economy because of China's zero tolerance policy towards COVID where they just shut down provinces whenever they see any uptick in cases. We also had an energy crisis, which was really self-imposed. It was because they reduced production of coal in order to meet environmental targets. And we also had Evergrande, which people at first were very concerned proposed systemic risk. But I think at this point, people understand that it is manageable by the country.

So when I look at all of those things, most of them are short term in nature and I would argue that the regulatory environment, I think left people wondering whether China was investable and were concerned that Chinese government had changed their attitude towards private business, but it's actually our view that if you look at the regulation that really happened this year, it's in line with what you've seen historically. From China, they're really only egregious regulation that came out this year was around education. And so our view is that there has been an overreaction and we think we're well positioned, hopefully at some point for a bounce. But again, that's certainly our view.

If I continue to look at performance-- look, there's a lot of volatility in the markets. Our team takes a very long term approach, so we like to take advantage of weakness in markets to add opportunities. And certainly, in Europe recently, that's been the case that it's created a huge opportunity, and again, we believe that our overweight to China leaves us well positioned in the future. But the longer somebody invests with us as you can see from this slide, the better you do because we get and we take a long-term time horizon when we invest and it's nice when we have minded investors.

If you look at the next slide, this looks at standard performance through September and it's been, as I mentioned, incredibly challenged, really just driven all by our year to date performance, which is really all come from our overweight to China and stock selection within China. But if you look at performance through December, you can see that we were quite strong over every period. So this performance has really just been about this year. And if I take kind of an annual perspective and I look at all the years that we've managed the portfolio, we've actually outperformed every year with the exception of 2018. And I would argue that 2018 was very similar to what we're experiencing this year and that it was very macro driven, it was driven by the trade wars that were going on between the US and China, we believe that volatility in the market set us up very well to take advantage of it and we were able to outperform nicely in 19.

We do believe that the underperformance this year while obviously, incredibly disappointing because our team is certainly focused on delivering strong performance over the long-term. We believe that the opportunities that this has created in the market will set us up well for future success. So again, we're very excited about how we're positioned today. We're finding not only great opportunities in China, but we're now finding some really great opportunities in Europe. We've added several new names over the last six to eight weeks and are very excited about them.

So that's-- that's our story. We really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to tell you about Invesco international companies, and we look forward to forward conversations and continuing the great dialogue that we've had with Devin and Tom, so thank you again for your time.