YouSaid · the spoken record

Sir Chris Hohn

lines on the record: 87
first: 2025-05-14
most recent: 2025-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“After you know, that's a very unusual number over a very long time period. And so Investors have always underestimated his value, including myself. And I bought the stock during the financial crisis at 10 times earnings and even board shares Warren Buffett was selling and reduced his stake from 25% to, I think he's got 15% and Belcher.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's the thing is The longer you can look out, if you've got a great company, the more valuable value there is. a company we own Moody's Moody's So it's been around 100 years. What do you think the average? I can ask you a question, make it fun. What do you think the average revenue growth over then 100 years has been?”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just like they do nothing. We really... If you are in the private equity world, that's normal. A private equity fund would hold an investment for their 10-year life funds normally or longer, 12 years, yeah, as you know. And so... And so we're an overused expression for some or misused. We take a private equity approach, i.e. that we have to hold the company forever. Because the stock market Maybe at very bad prices You want to sell? Yeah, if you need to sell. And so I really think you need to have that approach. And so the way we really like our long-term valuations, DCF. Most important things, and here's the thing”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Average holding period of our current portfolio is eight years. I'm not saying that's the limit, it's just the on average, some we've held for 13 years. Some new investments like G Aerospace two years, for the average weighted average holding period is eight years. But it could be 20.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spreadsheets, all of those, but not 50 pages. But really, honestly, one of the things we learned is, there's a really important point, is that We can have an advantage through long-termism. Which is the average stock is held by an institutional investor by under a year, or the stock market in the US.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we have some members of our team who are just inherently bearish and they're good for testing the bear case. We always want to hear how could technology disrupt and just what competition and”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will But we'll do reference checks on Relevant people okay so and see if we're missing something so we when we were looking at investing in aircraft engines with we spoke to the CEO of a former CEO of one of the competitive companies and He confirmed our thesis and actually said the margins should be much, much higher. And over time they will go there so that that's one of the pieces of diligence. Will assess management. Where I think it's important, but not critical if you have the right assets. Ideally through meeting them. The talk to competitors get their view. Look at competitive companies, look at the track record of the company. The usually you don't understand everything. And usually the things you find out are bad things. And I think we'll discuss it with our team and we want to hear competing.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to increase disruption. In ways we can't even predict, but there are things like... Call centers and we'll all go bankrupt and another segment is Indian outsourcing companies who do coding and things like that. Demand for those services Could collapse Because AI can do coding with half the people, yeah? Yep. But AI will increase the productivity and lower the cost base. Of all companies. And so if you have a company with these barriers to entry, it's going to be worth more. I think for generally competitive businesses, if you don't lead, you could become uncompetitive and be disrupted.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a position in alphabet, which is. Maybe I'm most risky investment. where there are clearly the company, and it's one of our smallest investments as a result, it's Where we have some level of protection because there are businesses like YouTube and their cloud business, which represent half the market cap today and cash and other things. So it is an old search, but search is critical. And so can they out-innovate competition? There's a risk of search fragmenting as competitors come in and try to, but it's a question mark. We don't think so. We think they have a lot of advantages of their data. To offer higher quality search results. But competition is increasing. Talking”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people believe it was a better product or a better product. Microsoft won that battle Because they had the installed base, the incumbency, which we talked about, and high switching costs, because once people are using their office software, they don't want to switch. And so people started using Teams. Something given to you free because it was good enough. It didn't have to be the best if I'm free.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a lot of power of incumbency. This is another important point. So let's take a company, Microsoft, which we've invested in. One of their barriers to entry is Or maybe because it creates a customer switching cost. What do I mean by this? So the Office franchise We're all familiar with has many products in it. Your applications, word processing, Excel, your email. Security, different things. And they sell it as a bundle. They don't disaggregate it. When a new Product or potential competitor enters. They can add it to the bundle. So Zoom came out with video conferencing. They could have potentially added all the things Microsoft does to that. So Microsoft had to respond and they launched Teams. They were able to distribute it through the bundle free to everybody. And even though Zoom”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying maybe there's 200 companies that we consider to be high quality and investable. And I mean, I'll let you a couple more traditional asset managers, bad businesses. Speaking as one, fossil fuel utilities, bad businesses, airlines, bad businesses, wireless telecom, bad businesses, we think media is bad. Advertising agencies, you know, it's a very long list. Why? Because it's competitive. With existing players and new technologies. And the one important thing that I've learned in my time in investing is investors underestimate the forces of competition and disruption. Because they just look today. Maybe there's a new company which has a first mover advantage. But then competition comes in Substitution and Wait, is it?”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Others, oh, many the auto industry is obviously a commodity, retail insurance. The commodities manufacturing, tobacco, the truth is anything in most things in manufacturing.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other reason for banks is very important. That sooner or later, May find Someone without a lot of intelligence comes to run them, and then it can be toxic. People going for growth, Anglo-Irish bank, if you remember that one there. And they just can destroy the shareholders by Getting bonuses, you know, bear sterns, you know. And nonalignment of interests with leverage and opacity.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't lear. You can't. I remember Pre-financial crisis, I had a look at Credit Suisse and I sat down with the then CODEGAN and Said, put his balance sheet in front of him from the annual accounts and said you have a multi-trillion dollar balance sheet. Can we walk through the line items? Because I don't understand it. He said, I don't either. He was a very honest guy. I really liked him. Yeah, very honest.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their low quality of earnings because they're very leveraged. And much more than people think, because people look at, oh, equity to risk-weighted assets, but equity total assets. Many banks have run it a hundred times. And so, two, they're opaque.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. We have a long list of companies we don't invest in. We're very focused and we call them the risky and bad industries. And I have invested in some of these in the past, but I've learned. Sorry for that as a banker. We got off the bank”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These exchanges can be very good. But of course, they've changed now. Unstock exchanges in many different businesses, sells data, and half their earnings are from data, and that's non-proprietary data, reselling non-proprietary data. Has a vulnerability on that piece. They're no longer just. What they used to be. And then there was a lot of growth without capital as people came and traded more, as capital markets grew. You grew without capital, which was very valuable.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the case of Deutsche Borser Starting with that, they had a derivative business called Eurex, which was a natural monopoly. It was a network effect. This was the barrier to entry. That liquidity of a marketplace for. Trading bond futures, European bond futures. The network effect of getting best prices in the most liquid market meant it became what is termed a winner takes all or natural monopoly. Once you have that liquidity, very hard to move people away. You can never compete on best price. And London Stock Exchange has that for LCH ClearNet business, a clearing business. And so... Where an exchange Can CME has it on US futures? Establish this natural monopoly by being the first mover. The winner takes all.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look into the detail of AENA, it's a different animal. It has a piece that's regulated and a much bigger piece, 70% of value, maybe more, which is unregulated. And so maybe the unregulated business, the regulated business will give you a bond-like return, 7%, but the unregulated give you a much higher return. Do you see”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it's really weak competition and rational competition. Okay, so the Take some water examples. Praddon Whitney competes with G and Safran. It has a 25% share of new orders as a product. But it's not nearly as good. It's got 35% of its engines grounded Multiple technical problems, it's lost a lot of trust, but it's there competing. And for new engines. Price isn't the most important thing in this industry. Reliability is. And so as it struggles, it has to raise prices. And sometimes where there is competition, that competition chooses not to compete, generally speaking, not a specific industry Decides to be rational and compete on non price based approach. And then the detail matters. So you might have looked at Heathrow Airport and say, oh, that airport is fully regulated. Airports can't be good.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I have. And actually, it's a general risk because if you have barriers too low, Competition or substitution eliminates your business and your investment. Barriers too high. Regulators may come knocking on your door. Yep. And so Every case is different The ideal case is you that there is competition. But weak competition Apparent competition. Okay, so”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried and is very potent if you have the lower your marginist. So, this is why you asked about growth and is it how important? If you're asking about volume growth, And I have low volume growth, but I have a lot of pricing growth. That's actually more important. Of the leveraged effect there's no cost associated with it.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most companies don't have pricing power. They can only price if they're lucky at inflation. And that's why people don't focus on it. They don't even look at where growth comes from. They just assume it's volume plus inflation. But there is a special group of super companies that can price above inflation. And that's... Buffett taught the test. Whether you have the moat. Okay. And this real pricing power above inflation can be very valuable. Because if you can price 1% above inflation and you have a 20% profit margin, your profits will grow 5% faster than revenue. And people don't go into it or analyze it because there's so few companies that have it. But this is something we have a lot of investments have this because”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've been bigging things like I'll go into that, but I want to go back to the point about growth can come from two forms, price and volume.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in effect and high returns on capital. They grow. Because there's more and more demand for travel, and so Again, capital intensity by itself, it's part of the equation Okay, but Tells you how valuable growth is okay, but what trumps Mind that expression what trumps all of this.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you have to look like everything into the detail. And some airports... Well, all airports have a regulation on landing charges. The non landing charges are unregulated. The shops, the advertising, the VIP lounges, the parking. Yep, and the so-called dual till regulation. One till is regulated, one till is unregulated. And those are very low capillary intensity.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending on valuation, not necessarily, or not necessarily at a fast rate. And growth can come from two forms, volume and price. So you have to break it down. Now, why isn't growth as important as people, investors usually assume it to be? Because you can have profitless growth The airline industry over 100 years has had a lot of growth. Airline travel has grown at 5% a year. Yep, continues to grow consistently. But airlines as a business. Cumulatively and collectively, have made almost minimal profits. Despite growth, because there are very low barriers to entry. And so I would say growth without barriers to entry is not a combination that you want.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they say, is it good or bad? Do people invest in bonds? They say, is it investment grade, non-investment grade, give for research? And if you like, bless it. And there, you can actually defer an issuer pays for the rating, but they don't have to... Refinance their bonds, which is a big part of it in any given year They can delay and defer, but eventually the debt has to be refinanced and rated And so I think essential need. Is the bigger point, but usually our companies have recurring and predictable revenue streams of essential products.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is important, but the predictability of when they recur. Is not Most important for us is something slightly different, which is essential product or service. We don't like things which are discretionary. Okay, so one space we've invested in for a long time is rating agencies. And here”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another important barrier to entry. You can see this in assets like Visa. Meta, two examples of network effects. And brands are another barrier to entry. But I'm not saying every brand is powerful, but you think about McDonald's as a value. There are some brands which are powerful and sustainable, but not all. And I'll mention one more moat, which is customer switching costs. where take mission critical software once it's installed. Companies are very reluctant to mess with it and switch because of the complexity.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space we like is aircraft engines. And it's a very complicated product because... Materials complexity, the engines run at such high temperatures that metals melt. And so many different things have to come together. Thousands and thousands of complex parts. So that's one where there are only two players in narrow body engines and two in wide body. And there'd be no new entrants for more than 50 years. The last new entrant was DE. And so that tells you something. It's a big industry, but it's so complex, very hard to enter. Another barrier to entry is... Installed base, which applies to the aircraft engine business once those engines are there They for various reasons you get the spare parts business on it. Barriers to entry is scale, although that's not a guarantee of... Of competitive moat. Network effects.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so we're planning exactly planning. And then Rhodes is no economic case to build a second road or you don't have the land. So for different literally, so infrastructure is, physical assets is one. A second is IP. Intellectual property, that's right. Is so advanced that it's very difficult to replicate.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telecom towers. So there are many forms of infrastructure, transmission towers that are hard to compete with because they're natural monopolies where, of course, Some of these things can be overbuilt, like cable. So there's a form of infrastructure, but it's... It's usually, and you have to look at the details of case by case, very unusual to try to end usually get the planning to build a second airport, so no economic case to it.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult to compete with and replace two substitution risk and competition risk. Those long term become very difficult. Why is this so important? Competition kills profits. Yep, that's as simple as substitution, eliminates your business. So we look at, there are many, many boats, one which most people don't look at. Most of us don't really look at, actually, interestingly, is irreplaceable physical assets. We're in a world where people just look at earnings. They don't look at Acid value or physical assets and And so we like quite a bit of infrastructure, airports, for example. One of our investments, which The airport group in Spain where private is. Yes, Aena. Just can never, they'll never build a second airport at Madrid or any other places. These are natural monopolies. But that also applies to toll roads and railroads.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't feel that I can have any confidence in that type of investing. Because The earnings power of those averages businesses. Is unpredictable. So, what are good molts? The most important answer is ones that are sustainable. A lot of people. And ideally, you would have multiple modes, multiple pieces of defense.”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is something a lot of people get wrong. They think it's about Growth often, or something new. Neither of them are those things in themselves to us. Matter by themselves. The most important thing. and without which it's Let's say the types of investing that we do is high barriers to entry the moats that Warren Buffett has talked about now can before we dig into that can a distressed asset of a A piece of real estate that's selling at half price because of a liquidation also be a good investment? Yes. So can there be a role for cheap average assets? Let's call them low quality assets which are trading at big discounts to replacement cost. Yes, that's a type of investing that can work that I've done in my time. Cheap average businesses. Okay, but I Or cheap bad businesses, but”
2025-05-14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir Chris Hohn: Strategic Investing, Long-Term Value and Purposeful Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source