January 2020: the world was on the precipice of a global medical emergency that would empower the state, increase the might of technology firms, the pace of technological adoption, upend our cities, and dramatically accelerate the rise of China.
“Forecasting is difficult, especially about the future… but one can prepare for the future that has already happened”
Peter Drucker
Think back to 1970. Oil was at $3.20 a barrel, the US had just begun détente with the Soviet Union, and the shah of Iran was the US protégé in the gulf.
- By 1980, Iran was in revolution, oil was 7 times more expensive, the US was the world’s largest creditor, and Deng Xiaoping started opening up China to the world
- By 1990, the USSR was within a year of dissolution, and the US was the world’s greatest debtor
- By 2000, China was joining the WTO, and the internet had begun to transform our lives
- By 2010, the US financial system had collapsed, and China was the world’s second largest economy.
Managing risk—that is to say, building strategies that are resilient to events like these—is not easy. So what can investor’s do?
In Road to 2030, we take a practitioner's perspective aided by both internal and external experts to ask the ‘what if’ questions and consider major changes to the status quo. Road to 2030 explores the investment consequences of different scenarios – even those you wouldn’t imagine.
Road to 2030 explained
The Road to 2030 project is an investment led project designed to articulate possible visions of the future, the key drivers behind those outcomes, and to highlight areas of undiscounted change.
The project engaged investment teams at Ninety One around a series of roundtables held in 2019 and 2020. The primary purpose of these exercises was to ask “what if” questions in a structured way, encouraging us as investment managers to stretch our thinking and consider possibilities that seemed remote today. A pandemic, for instance, was one of the potential game changers highlighted early on in our research process, precisely the sort of extraordinary risk such a project should be able to concentrate minds on.
At the very least, the Road to 2030 is a horizon scanning and risk management exercise; at its best, it provides a foundational understanding of the main drivers that will transform markets over the next decade.
“Raising one’s head to view the vastness of the universe; lowering one’s eyes to inspect the intricacies of things.”
- Calligraphy by the fourth century writer Wang Xizhi