Mr Bolton wanted exposure to Cellnet – but he didn’t buy shares in BT. “Mobile
was obviously where the growth was,” he said. But BT had a big landline
business, which he didn’t want to put money into, whereas Cellnet accounted
for a much larger proportion of Securicor. So he bought Securicor shares
instead.
“I realised that at some stage BT would want full control and buy
Securicor’s stake,” he said. He hung on until it launched a takeover
bid in 1999. The value of Securicor’s holding in Cellnet had grown from £4m
to about £3bn.
Mr Bolton’s other inspired mobile buy was Nokia, the Finnish company that went
on to dominate the handset market for many years. At the time it consisted
of an array of disparate businesses.
“I met Nokia’s finance director, who was an impressive figure, and he
told me that he was selling everything except the mobile phone arm,” Mr
Bolton said. “I bought the shares, which did very well, although I sold
them too early.”
Other investments that delivered handsome returns for Mr Bolton’s clients
included technology stocks bought at bargain prices after the dotcom crash.
He stepped down from the fund in 2008 and took up a role mentoring his
firm’s younger fund managers before launching the China Special Situations
fund in 2010.
Like many investors, Mr Bolton believes that the growth in consumer spending
in China offers opportunities for stock pickers. He started to think about
some of the sectors that could benefit and realised that China’s growing
middle classes were likely to increase their spending on optical products
such as glasses and contact lenses, and that the country’s ageing population
would further boost demand.
So he set about finding a suitable manufacturer that sold in China – but he
found it in Taiwan.
“Formosa Optical has a subsidiary that owns a contact lens business in
China,” he said. “The subsidiary is also listed, in China, but
shares in the parent company offered a cheaper route to a holding. This is
just the type of consumer business I look for.”
He owns other companies with exposure to China but listed elsewhere. Two trade
on the London market – Fortune Oil and Hutchison China MediTech – while
21Vianet, which houses customers’ internet servers in special buildings
called data centres, is listed in New York.
Mr Bolton’s China fund may not have produced the spectacular returns of its
forerunner, despite its recent surge. But in his fourth decade as a fund
manager, Anthony Bolton is still prepared to take the long way round in the
search for profits.
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