‘Akin to raising the Titanic’: Painful tenure for Schroder UK Public Private sparks doubts over its future

Investment Week, Valeria Martinez, 2 May 2023:

Schroders’ mission to resurrect the former Woodford trust as Schroder UK Public Private, now rebranded to Schroders Capital Global Innovation, has been compared to raising the Titanic, with its future placed in doubt after a tenure overseeing lacklustre performance.

Formerly Woodford Patient Capital, the trust changed its name to Schroder UK Public Private trust on 13 December 2019, following the appointment of Schroders as manager in the wake of the collapse of Woodford Investment Management.

The investment trust, which, at the time, enjoyed the UK’s largest trust IPO when it raised £800m in 2015, had a mandate to provide early stage capital for businesses coming out of universities, and then continual capital as they offered proof of concept and continued to grow.

In 2022, SCGI’s NAV total returns fell by 40.7%, driven largely by the listed portfolio. Oxford Nanopore’s shares, which represented 37% of the portfolio at the start of the period, collapsed by 64.6%.

In the trust’s annual report for the year ended 31 December 2022, chair Tim Edwards said that despite the progress made over the last three years, the NAV had fallen as the company “continues to work through the issues in the legacy portfolio”, which he argued “have been made more challenging with the change in the environment for growth capital investing”.

In a briefing note on 17 April, QuotedData wrote that Schroders has “a monumental task” at hand by attempting to “untangle the mess” that was the trust’s legacy portfolio. However, the team argued that in Schroders’ third year at the helm, the grace period “is coming to a close”.

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