The QCI research team combines the skills of traditional financial investors with the deep expertise of visionary technologists, inventors and entrepreneurs. This enables us to assess technologies and teams and to identify potentials at an early stage. This approach requires a sound tech background and a long-term investment horizon.
Our investment approach combines a top-down view of the major disruptive technology trends of the next ten years with a detailed bottom-up analysis of individual companies.
First, we identify inefficient industries or emerging markets & trends that show potential for exponential growth. Inefficiency here means, for example, the excessive consumption of finite resources and high CO2 emissions, but also the lack of automation of recurring tasks or the paper-based handling of data.
In these inefficient industries and new markets, we look for technologies that can add significant value over existing solutions and thus disrupt entire industries. This approach requires a deep understanding of technology and the method of First Principles Thinking. This involves breaking a problem down to its physical truths and developing a solution approach based on current technological realities.
Exponential growth occurs where scalable, new technologies can reduce inefficiencies in existing markets, or where product innovations create completely new markets. Technologies that are not yet fully ready for the market but whose market entry is foreseeable have particularly great potential.
We analyze the company's technological positioning in terms of maturity, feasibility, scalability as well as unique selling points compared to the competition.
Based on our entrepreneurial experience, the quality, experience as well as commitment and passion of the management team, in addition to an innovative corporate culture, plays a decisive role for us.
A sustainable business model requires the transferability of technology scaling into revenue growth, the mid- to long-term ability to achieve profitability, and an at least partially integrated value chain.
We include ESG ratings from established providers (e.g. MSCI) in our analysis process. We generally exclude companies from certain sectors such as armaments or oil and gas. We also do not invest in companies that seriously violate the UN Global Compact.
Structural risks can be both regulatory in nature and internal to the company. We therefore analyze political developments and governance issues within companies...
Based on all these factors, we create sales, profitability and cash flow forecasts and estimate how the company should be valued within the next few years. These models take into account, among other things, the market acceptance and penetration of new products, changes in market share, potential changes in the capital structure, as well as scaling effects and corresponding cost degressions.
We take a long-term approach. We therefore define a long-term investment hypothesis for each company in which we set out our expected company development. We regularly check whether our portfolio companies develop according to these investment hypotheses. Our experienced team gives us the confidence to form our own, differentiated opinion.
Both our clear investment approach and in-depth company analyses encourage us to patiently follow our convictions even in difficult phases.
However, if there are clear reasons for an undesirable development, we also remove companies from the portfolio or reduce the weighting.
We continuously monitor and evaluate all securities in the fund. Even after an investment decision has been made, we are in regular contact with the management teams of the companies, monitor quarterly and annual reports and further developments of the companies. We do this, among other things, on the basis of alternative data sources that we develop ourselves (e.g. web crawlers). If we identify changes in market potential, technology leadership, management and strategy, or if market or technology risks emerge, we propose to the fund manager an adjustment of the weighting and valuation in the portfolio.
If a company develops contrary to our initial investment hypothesis over a longer period of time, we initiate restructuring measures as part of active portfolio management. This process is particularly important for dynamically developing technology companies and in turbulent technology markets and requires a high degree of entrepreneurial experience and technological background knowledge. This distinguishes active investment management from passive funds, e.g. ETFs.