Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Durable Advantage Fund” first quarter 2022 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. Baron Durable Advantage Fund (the “Fund”) declined 10.3% (Institutional Shares) during the first quarter, compared to the 4.6% decline for the S&P 500 Index (the “Index”), the Fund’s benchmark. Try to spend some time looking at the fund’s top 5 holdings to be informed about their best picks for 2022.
In its Q1 2022 investor letter, Baron Durable Advantage Fund mentioned Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) and explained its insights for the company. Founded in 1989, Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) is a Dublin, Ireland-based multinational professional services company with a $181.4 billion market capitalization. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) delivered a -30.97% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -0.29%. The stock closed at $286.17 per share on May 16, 2022.
Here is what Baron Durable Advantage Fund has to say about Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) in its Q1 2022 investor letter:
“Another good example is the leading consulting company, Accenture, plc (NYSE:ACN), whose stock was down 18% during the quarter despite the company reporting sparkling results with mid-20s year-over-year growth rates in revenues, EBIT, and EPS, driven by double-digit growth across all markets, industries, and services while continuing to gain market share (growing at nearly 3 times the market rate). In addition to expected strength in smaller deals, Accenture had 36 clients booking over $100 million worth of business in the last quarter alone. While most investors remain concerned about a pull-forward of demand, the company is not seeing a slowdown as digital transformations became a must for organizations to remain competitive as described by the company in its latest earnings conference call:
‘Pre-pandemic, what we saw were clients much more into – they did transformation quite sequentially, right? The pandemic was a major shock. You saw the leaders who were kind of coming into that saying we’ve got to go even faster, and you saw a bunch of companies saying we need to leapfrog, right? We need to move online. We need to do digital transformation. And that meant that we saw companies starting to take on not sequential transformation but what we call compressed transformation, where they’re at the same time doing manufacturing as well as sales’.”
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Our calculations show that Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) fell short and didn’t make it on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) was in 50 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 56 funds in the previous quarter. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) delivered a -12.25% return in the past 3 months.
In April 2022, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) in another article. You can find other investor letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2022 Q1 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
