The trust first invested in Meta at its 2012 IPO, then named Facebook, establishing a 1.22% position, but at the time of the sale in 2020 SMT had reduce its exposure to 0.32%, according to data from Morningstar Direct.
It had been consistently reducing its allocation for several months prior to the sale, but at its October 2016 peak SMT had a 4.99% portfolio allocation.
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For the new purchase, the trust has opened a 1% portfolio position, making Meta the 27th biggest holding in the fund.
According to the latest factsheet, SMT has 99 investments, with 70.6% in 47 listed companies and 28.7% of the trust in 52 private equity firms.
SMT purchased Meta in October 2023, and lead manager Tom Slater told Investment Week the managers had based it on Meta’s current and future abilities to deploy AI for growth.
He said: “We recently bought back a holding in Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp. Click to message ads are highly effective but only the largest companies have the resources to respond to messages at that scale. AI can do it for everyone else. And there are many other opportunities to profitably deploy these tools.”
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In an update in December, Claire Shaw, investment specialist at SMT, explained that the management team saw Meta as “one of the companies set to be a big beneficiary of generative AI”.
“With 3.7 billion monthly active users, most are familiar with Meta platforms. The reach of the ‘Family of Four’ (Facebook Blue, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) makes them an advertiser’s dream, given that these platforms touch 70% of the connected population outside China.”
Despite this global presence, Shaw said both WhatsApp and Messenger have “historically been under-monetised” and SMT sees the opportunity to utilise AI to improve both platforms and in turn offer “potential growth revenues”.
Slater and co-manager Lawrence Burns previously admitted last year that, retrospectively, it had been a “mistake” for them and former lead manager James Anderson to exit the trust’s investment in Meta and Google owner Alphabet rather than China’s Alibaba, Meituan Dianping and Tencent at a time when China-US relations was putting more pressure on the portfolio.
