Technological innovation has ushered in a period of disruption within the consumer sector, where market share is shifting between companies, creating new winners and losers, with some of yesteryear’s heroes fading away as new stars rise.
In our opinion, disruption yields opportunities. This makes for a compelling investment case for the consumer sector – one that our Invesco Global Consumer Trends Fund seeks to capitalize on.
The technological landscape has changed vastly in recent years, and whether we are aware of it or not, it has changed the way we live our lives in so many ways. Let us rewind to the year 2000: the internet was still in its infancy, social media was unheard of and mobile phones were just that… phones. Now, nearly two decades later, technology has become an integral part of our lives.
In this series of articles, we will take a look at how developments such as the internet, social media, and smartphones are rapidly reshaping the consumer space. Technology is changing the way we behave as consumers: it is changing where we shop, how we shop and how we consume media. It is also changing the time we spend to do discretionary things – we can shop whenever we want, and we can consume media whenever we want.
These changes are global: they are not confined to the developed markets, they are happening in the emerging markets at the same time – sometimes, at an even faster pace. In our view, being able to see technology drive changes in consumer behaviour on a global scale makes this theme particularly powerful from an investment standpoint.
We believe that investing in a market that is undergoing disruption is best done through bottom-up fundamental research and stock picking, and this is the cornerstone of the investment process we use for the Invesco Global Consumer Trends Fund.
About seventy percent of our portfolio offers exposure to a number of trends within the consumer space that we think will continue for the foreseeable future. And for us, it all starts with connectivity.
