Baron Funds, an asset management company, released its “Baron Asset Fund” investor letter. You can download a copy of the same here. In the second quarter, the fund fell 21.09%. However, the firm believes that the fund is positioned to perform well in the current market concerns of recession and inflation. In addition, you can check the top 5 holdings of the fund to know its best picks in 2022.
In the second quarter investor letter, Baron Funds discussed stocks like ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR). Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is a clinical research company. On August 29, 2022, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) stock closed at $209.22 per share. One-month return of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was -8.67% and its shares lost 18.20% of their value over the last 52 weeks. ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) has a market capitalization of $17.057 billion.
Here is what Baron Funds specifically said about ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR):
“We established a position in ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR), the second largest participant in the $50 billion Contract Management Organization (CMO) market. Founded in 1990, ICON provides outsourced drug and device development and commercialization services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies, as well as to governments and public health organizations. We believe the CMO industry and ICON, in particular, is poised to benefit from a variety of positive secular growth trends, and we believe that ICON should remain relatively unimpacted by potential disruption in the broader economy.
As clinical drug trials become increasingly complex and global in their scope, market share among CMOs has been shifting to large-scale providers like ICON. The company offers several important advantages to drug developers, particularly smaller and mid-sized biotechnology firms that lack the internal infrastructure to run the trials necessary to obtain regulatory approval for their drugs. These include the economic efficiency associated with converting previously fixed costs to variable costs, and a significant reduction in the time required to bring new drug treatments to market.
ICON’s large scale has also enabled the company to secure long-term strategic partnerships with multiple large pharmaceutical customers, which provides added visibility into their revenue pipeline. Lastly, we believe that there remains a long runway for further drug development services to be outsourced to the CMO industry…” (Click here to view the full text)
ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is not on the list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was held by 26 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the second quarter compared to 30 in the previous quarter.
We discussed ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in another article and shared Baron Funds’ views on the company. You can check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 2022 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other prominent investors.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.