Baron Global Advantage Strategy

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPACEX.A) designs, manufactures, and launches rockets, satellites, and spacecrafts. Its ultimate goal is to make humanity multi-planetary. Products include reusable orbital launch offerings and a broadband service leveraging its satellite constellation, Starlink.
We believe SpaceX will continue to drive down the cost of space launches and capture market share with its unique, reliable, and improving reusable launch capabilities. As costs decline, we also expect demand for access to space to increase. By leveraging its launch cost leadership, vertical integration, and innovative design approach, we think SpaceX will have an advantage in building and operating its rapidly expanding satellite-based broadband services, creating an even more attractive growth profile for the company.

Shopify Inc. (SHOP) is a cloud-based software provider offering an operating system for multi-channel commerce. The company serves over 2 million merchants that processed $235 billion of gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2023. Shopify is the second-largest e-commerce player in the U.S., measured by GMV.
Shopify has developed a scalable platform that offers an end-to-end commerce solution to merchants of all sizes, including offline, international, and B2B. Shopify’s aggregate scale, innovation, and ecosystem of partners enable merchants to take payments, receive loans, and sell their products internationally. With less than 2% share of $20 trillion in global commerce, it has a long runway for growth.

MercadoLibre, Inc. (MELI) is the largest e-commerce company in Latin America. The company operates the MercadoLibre e-commerce marketplace, the Mercado Pago fintech platform, and the Mercado Envios suite of shipping solutions for sellers on its platform.
MercadoLibre benefits from the emergence of two secular trends: e-commerce and digital payments. The company has a significant first-mover advantage and is investing aggressively in logistics to widen its competitive moat. Latin America is a predominantly cash-based economy with e-commerce penetration under 20%, and MercadoLibre has an attractive, asset-light marketplace business model. We believe its logistics network is a key competitive advantage, and we see a significant opportunity in the growth of its fintech offerings.

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) sells semiconductors, systems, and software for accelerated computing, gaming, and generative AI (GenAI).
Computing demand has been doubling every one to two years, driven by electrification, digitization, and recent advancements in AI, yet supply growth has decelerated dramatically due to the slowdown in Moore's law. NVIDIA’s accelerated computing architecture enables continued growth in supply of computing through parallelization. We are at the tipping point of a new era in computing, with NVIDIA at its epicenter as GenAI adoption grows. Given its leading market share in gaming, data centers, and autonomous machines, we believe NVIDIA can grow rapidly for years to come.

Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) offers enhanced security and performance for websites, apps, and SaaS. Its network spans over 100 countries and connects with over 10,000 ISPs, cloud providers, SaaS providers, and enterprises. Its edge network operates within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the developed world.
Cloudflare's technology is 30% to 50% cheaper than that of peers, while its gross margins are 1,000 to 2,000 basis points higher. It is widely respected among developers, who migrate it from personal to enterprise use. These advantages allow Cloudflare to service about 25% of global internet traffic. We believe Cloudflare will maintain 30%-plus growth for several years given its unique technology and go-to-market strategy that is disrupting a $40 billion market, along with the potential to attack a nascent Edge Computing market that could grow to $10 billion in four years.

Coupang, Inc. (CPNG) is South Korea's largest e-commerce company.
Coupang's proprietary logistics system enables faster delivery times and easier returns than peers, which we think should drive superior customer retention, lifetime value, and network effects, allowing Coupang to become highly profitable in the intermediate term. Long term, we believe Coupang will become the dominant player in South Korean e-commerce and among the country's largest retailers. We also like its prospects in third-party fulfillment and advertising.

Argenx SE (ARGX) is a biotechnology company developing antibodies for the treatment of autoimmune disorders. The company is in the early years of the commercial launch of its drug Vyvgart (efgartigimod alfa) for a rare muscle weakness disorder.
Efgartigimod has potentially broad applicability in ameliorating overactive antibody-based diseases. Efgartigimod is a true "pipeline in a product," where the product itself is the platform, as it has the potential to be used against a diverse range of diseases—something that is rarely achieved in the biotechnology space. We expect the share price to increase as argenx proves its product’s effectiveness in multiple autoantibody disorders.

Snowflake Inc. (SNOW) provides a cloud-native data platform with use cases across data analytics, data sharing, and recently added transactional workloads. It enables storage and computation across leading public cloud providers and simpler and cheaper deployments with high concurrency usage.
Snowflake is leveraging its cloud-native architecture to offer more affordable, scaled, secure, and easy-to-use functionality that is lacking in many competing solutions. Its early-mover advantage, broad vision, strong brand, growing system, and talented management should enable growth within a large addressable market. In addition, we expect Snowflake’s new CEO and product launches to allow the company to better address growing data needs across generative AI workloads. Snowflake's unique marketplace and data sharing offerings should also accelerate usage among customers.

Bajaj Finance Limited (BAF.IN) is a leading non-banking financial corporation in India. It offers various financial products and services including housing loans, consumer durables financing, small- and medium-sized enterprise credit, and rural loans.  
We believe Bajaj is well positioned to benefit from growing demand for consumer financial services in India. The company's data analytics platform is a key competitive advantage that enables it to earn high risk-adjusted returns (return on equities can sustain 22% to 24%, in our view). Bajaj is quickly becoming India's largest fintech player by creating an ecosystem of apps offering insurance, brokerage, and wealth management, among many other new products and services. We expect Bajaj to grow earnings by roughly 25% to 30% over the next five years.

Datadog, Inc. (DDOG) offers an SaaS-based observability platform that helps businesses keep software and applications up and running. Core products include infrastructure, application performance monitoring, log management, and cloud security to provide visibility into and secure IT environments. 
Datadog employs a viral go-to-market strategy and an expanding product line to generate growth through its land-and-expand business model. It is also rapidly increasing its platform capabilities with a broad use, single-pane-of-glass strategy. With strong secular trends, a large total addressable market, flexible platform, solid unit economics, and robust product line, we believe Datadog is well positioned to generate significant growth over the coming years.