Baillie Gifford’s flagship investment trust company, the £16 billion Scottish Mortgage fund, said its net asset value (NAV) total return was 27.4% and its share price total return was 26.8% in the year to March 31 — above the FTSE All-World Index’s return of 18%.
Scottish Mortgage’s share price is now trading around its 2021 all-time highs at about £15.25, giving the Edinburgh-based FTSE 100 investment company a stock market value of almost £17 billion.
The investment trust’s biggest holdings at March 31 included SpaceX, semiconductor giants TSMC, Nvidia and ASML, social media firm Byte Dance, Latin American ecommerce platform MercadoLibre, payments company Stripe, Amazon, Meta, Chinese e-commerce firm Pinduoduo, Ferrari, Cloudflare and AI model developer Anthropic.
Scottish Mortgage invested £150 million in SpaceX several years ago — and that stake is now worth at least £3 billion and makes up 19.3% of the fund’s assets.
The investment trust’s total dividend for the year will increase by 4.3% to 4.57p per share.
“A notable contributor to performance was SpaceX, where continued strong operational execution has led to a significant upward revaluation, increasing its position as the company’s largest holding by some margin,” wrote Scottish Mortgage chair Christopher Samuel.
“This highlights both the importance of access to leading private companies and the extent to which a small number of exceptional investments can drive long‑term returns …
“While performance over the year is encouraging, it follows a more challenging period for growth investing, which continues to influence the company’s five-year record. Shareholder experience will therefore vary depending on the period considered.
“Over the longer term, however, performance remains strong. The ten-year NAV total return of 435.2% compares favourably with 233.9% from the FTSE All-World Index, reflecting the benefits of a patient, long-term approach.
“As in previous years, we emphasise that one year is too short a timeframe over which to assess performance. Our focus remains firmly on long-term outcomes, and the Board continues to believe that the portfolio is well positioned to deliver attractive returns over time …
“Revenue earnings have returned to broadly similar levels to 2024, as 2025 was impacted by the write-off of accrued interest income on the Northvolt Convertible Note. As has consistently been the case, the portfolio is primarily focused on capital growth rather than income generation, with many of our largest holdings reinvesting cashflows rather than distributing income.”
Scottish Mortgage is managed by Tom Slater and Lawrence Burns.
Slater wrote: “SpaceX is a powerful illustration of why this Trust exists. We invested approximately £150 million several years ago in a private company that most funds could not own, held it through periods when private market valuations were deeply unfashionable, and watched it compound into a position worth several billion pounds.
“That outcome was not available to a passive investor. It was not available to an active manager constrained by the need to stay close to an index, quarterly performance pressure, or a prohibition on private companies. It was available to us because of the specific structural advantages of a closed-end investment trust with a long-term mandate, patient shareholders, a board that judges the manager over years rather than quarters, and the willingness to look foolish in the interim …
We own seven of the world’s ten most valuable private companies. We own businesses at the epicentre of the AI buildout, in the infrastructure of global commerce, and at the frontier of industries from electric vehicles to satellite communications to autonomous logistics. The opportunity ahead of these businesses is, in most cases, greater than what lies behind them.
“The forces that defined this year, the AI buildout, the retreat from multilateralism, the competitive reckoning in China, are interlocking, not independent. Navigating a world shaped by them requires patient ownership of exceptional businesses and the willingness to hold them through periods of discomfort. That is what Scottish Mortgage has always done. The world is changing faster than it has in decades. We would rather be invested in the companies driving that change than sheltering from it.”
Burns wrote: “We are well aware that the history of revolutionary technology is also a history of market overshoot …
“Yet the rational response is not to stand aside from a technological revolution. That is not the safe position it may appear to be. If AI disrupts most industries, then avoiding it doesn’t remove risk, it merely shifts it. You might still own businesses exposed to disruption, and not own the businesses in line for generational upside.
“The harder task is to remain invested without becoming indiscriminate: to distinguish between durable value and temporary exuberance, between enabling infrastructure and fragile applications, and between companies that merely invoke AI and those that can turn it into enduring economic advantage.
“The emergence of capable agents has made us more convinced that AI demand can keep expanding. But history argues for humility. There will be waste, disappointment and overbuilding along the way. Our job is not to believe every claim made for AI, but to own the exceptional companies that can benefit as intelligence becomes cheaper, more capable and more widely deployed.”