Murray International (MYI) benefited from its genuinely global portfolio in 2025 as gains in Latin America and Asia as well as the US pushed the £2.1bn equity income trust to a total underlying return of 21.9%.
Shareholders enjoyed a 36% total return as the shares shed their discount and ended December on a small premium having started the year on a 9% discount.
Both figures easily beat the 12.6% increase in the MSCI ACWI High Dividend Yield index, which the investment trust adopted as its new benchmark at half-year results in August.
The company said it had benefited from the breadth of the portfolio run by Aberdeen fund managers Martin Connaghan and Samantha Fitzpatrick with top performers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Singapore Telecommunications, US chip maker Broadcom and tobacco giants Philip Morris, its top holding, and BAT.
The year saw advances in portfolio income as well as capital enabling the 3.3%-yielder, a “dividend hero” of the Association of Investment Companies, to declare a final dividend of 4.6p per share that takes the total pay-out for the year 5% higher to 12.8p.
This is covered 1.1 times by revenue per share of 13.9p which shot up 19.8% from 11.6p, enabling the trust’s board to add £11.2m to revenue reserves, lifting the pot supporting future distributions to £85.4m.
Murray International currently leads the small band of Global Equity Income trusts over one year with a 38.8% shareholder return. Over five years it ranks second out of six peers with a 103.9% total return. Its use of gearing, borrowing, remains moderate at 4.4%.
“By almost any metric, this has been a strong year for your company which has delivered robust absolute and relative performance,” said chair Virginia Holmes.
The equity portfolio of 51 stocks is balanced with 30.7% of assets in North America, 24.5% in continental Europe, 23.3% in Asia excluding Japan, 9.8% in the UK and 8.2% in Latin America. Analysis by Aberdeen shows that this broad asset allocation provided more than double of its outperformance compared to stock picking, with returns from Asia providing a counterweight to the AI-related gains in North America. The trust’s small holdings in bonds and preference shares was as in recent years reduced to 2.5%.
Diageo was a detractor as the drinks group suffered from weak consumer confidence and had to withdraw its growth targets, leading to a change in the chief executive. While disappointed and frustrated, the managers believe the shares offer long-term value and added to the holding, which lies outside their top 20.
By contrast, they highlighted TSMC’s exceptional performance with the chip foundry specialist seeing its revenues soar 31.6% to a record 3.81trn Taiwanese dollars in response to the surge in spending on artificial intelligence (AI).
“As impressive as TSMC’s fundamentals remain, we have been mindful of how strongly the shares have performed. We have used this strength to manage the overall positions, trimming both TSMC and other holdings that have been buoyed by the AI-related rally, ensuring the portfolio maintains balanced exposure,” they said.
Our view
James Carthew, head of investment company research at QuotedData, said: “Murray International’s results are worth celebrating. By taking a truly active approach to investing, it has delivered considerable outperformance over the past 12 months. This is true not just of its immediate global equity income peers but also of the wider peer group of global funds. It is great to see it trading at a premium and issuing equity.”
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