Hale: Japan ranks second globally for high-margin billion-dollar public companies
Rob Hale · Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462) · Sep 29, 2025 · at 51:24
Rob Hale, co-CEO of activist fund ValueAct Capital, explains why his firm expanded into Japanese public equities by measuring business quality via pricing power and high gross margins.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The number one market Is the U S with about a thousand companies with over a billion market cap and above 40% gross margins. The number two market is Japan with 250. After that, you get to numbers around 50 to a hundred in countries in Europe.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rob Hale
Hale: Activist funds fail when they act as campaigners instead of investors
“Part of the reason that activist investing has had its cycles and not every activist investor has survived those cycles because a lot of practitioners of the industry have been excellent campaigners, great users of the media, but not necessarily great investor…”
Hale: Strong franchises tolerate capital misallocation for a decade; commodity businesses bankrupt
“If you're a steel company or an airliner and you're in some commodity industry and you misallocate capital for 10 years, you go bankrupt. Someone takes you over. If you're Microsoft, if you're Adobe, if you have a very strong franchise and you don't necessaril…”
Hale: Activist ideas are almost never novel to internal company employees
“Usually when we're investing in a company, there are a lot of people inside the company who see the exact same opportunity that we see. It's almost never the case that we have some idea that nobody in the company has ever thought of.”
Hale: Rebuilding cost structures from zero base beats relying on 10-Ks
“That analysis of let's just ignore what you see in the 10 K. Let's just build up zero base. What does this business cost structure look like? That is by far, I think the most important exercise that we do early in our due diligence process.”
Hale: Activists in Japan must ask 'yes when' to avoid decade-long delays
“One thing that we've learned to focus on is when you hear yes, you always have to ask yes when, because yes can mean yes, but in 10 years after I've retired, and you want to make sure that that's not the source of the misunderstanding.”