Independent Franchise Partners LLP

Independent Franchise Partners' $14.3 billion U.S.-listed portfolio ended March 2026 as one of the more actively reconstructed mandates in this filing cycle — a 26-name book whose Q1 movements are best understood as two deliberate bets executed simultaneously. The portfolio's most consequential trade was a $604 million reduction in Corteva, almost eliminating that position from 10.5 million shares to 1.2 million and compressing the agribusiness-and-seeds exposure that had been one of the portfolio's largest sector tilts coming into the quarter. That capital was not held in cash: it was redeployed into a health-care rebuild that occurred across four names at once — Bristol-Myers Squibb was increased by 2.1 million shares worth $167 million, Solventum was increased by 367,000 shares worth roughly a net positive despite price depreciation, Kenvue was held flat, and Johnson & Johnson was increased by 1.2 million shares at a $31 million net addition. The healthcare cluster, which includes Ryan Specialty in financial services and Lauder which was reduced, collectively remains the portfolio's largest sector at 30.6% of assets. The quarter's single largest share-count increase was Salesforce, which jumped from 538,000 shares to 4.0 million shares — a 650% increase that deployed roughly $590 million in net new capital into the cloud-software name at a time when the broader software sector was under valuation pressure. That move alone, combined with the Corteva elimination, explains most of the portfolio's character shift: it is less agribusiness and more software and healthcare. The portfolio simultaneously trimmed what had been a large media-and-entertainment allocation across Fox Corporation, News Corp, Warner Bros Discovery, and Warner Music Group — each reduced materially in a quarter when advertising-revenue outlooks were being reset — and held Live Nation flat despite the stock's own quarterly volatility, reflecting continued conviction in the live-entertainment recovery. The remaining positions in technology — Airbnb held flat through weakness, Zillow Class A increased by 20.5% in shares into a declining stock, eBay and Gartner held at essentially their existing weights — are consistent with the manager's preference for consumer-internet and market-infrastructure names where the underlying earnings power is not correlated to a single macro driver. The overall AUM declined from $15.7 billion to $14.3 billion despite the Salesforce addition, because the drawdown in Corteva, Lauder, Philip Morris, and the media names collectively outweighed the value created by the additions. This is a portfolio that made deliberate sector choices in Q1 and absorbed the markdowns that came with them.