Baillie Gifford & CO

The biggest adds table is blunt: Baillie Gifford wants durable earnings behind its growth narrative. The new capital isn’t chasing the newest story; it’s reinforcing the plumbing that makes those stories work.

• Royal Bank of Canada (RY) went from negligible to a $740.2M, 0.67% position, a massive build that introduces a high‑quality, oligopolistic Canadian bank as a stabilizer in an otherwise volatile book.
• CRH and QXO together represent a clear bet that building materials and distribution will enjoy a multiyear volume and pricing cycle, with CRH ramped to $641.5M and QXO to $827.2M despite QXO sitting below their cost.
• Broadcom and Apple were each increased aggressively, lifting AVGO to $513.0M and AAPL to $509.4M, reinforcing the idea that AI returns will accrue to semiconductor and device incumbents with pricing power.
• Alphabet’s voting Class A line (GOOGL) was enlarged by 44.2% to just over $1.00B, even as they cut the non‑voting Class C — a quality upgrade, not a FAANG de‑risk.
• Axon and RBC Bearings both saw large percentage increases, lifting AXON to $1.72B and RBC to $489.8M, underscoring a preference for industrial tech with real contracts and margins over more narrative‑driven hardware names.

Smaller but telling, Affirm and Kaspi.kz were also added to, suggesting they still like fintech and emerging‑market financial platforms — but selectively, and where unit economics already work.

On the funding side, the trims are not a repudiation of growth; they’re a house‑cleaning of the most stretched and speculative tiers of the book. The names coming down are either big winners with enormous gains or stories whose risk now looks less worth the volatility budget.

• Rocket Lab was slashed by 43.6%, freeing roughly $817.6M of notional at today’s price; that’s a clear step back from early‑stage space as a core theme.
• Coupang, still underwater versus their cost, was cut by 34.7%, a rare admission that scale doesn’t automatically equate to attractive shareholder economics.
• Royalty Pharma saw a 38.0% reduction, pointing to less enthusiasm for leveraged royalty structures in health care versus direct exposure to operators like Dexcom or Intuitive Surgical.
• Meta, Microsoft, and Netflix were all meaningfully trimmed despite being deeply in the green, with META and MSFT providing several hundred million dollars each of “house money” to redeploy into AI infrastructure and financials.
• Cloudflare and MercadoLibre, both long‑held growth winners with triple‑digit gains versus cost, were moderated rather than abandoned, shrinking but still central in the portfolio.

Further down the book, modest cuts to Roblox, Duolingo, Joby, and Rivian show a quiet de‑emphasis of unproven or loss‑making consumer and hardware stories. Baillie Gifford isn’t exiting innovation; it’s demoting the parts where the path to cash looks most tenuous.

At the sector level, the headline is subtle, but the underlying rotation is not. Technology’s share of the top‑50 crept from 43.04% to 43.06%, yet the composition is tilting toward semis, AI platforms, and profitable software rather than pure‑play consumer apps.

Industrials moved from 9.27% to 9.78% on the back of bigger stakes in Axon, CRH, RBC Bearings, and incremental bets across automation and aerospace. That’s an explicit expression of “real‑world” growth — logistics, defense, and construction — to complement the digital stack.

Finance rose from 6.01% to 6.78%, driven almost entirely by building RY and adding to Affirm while maintaining significant exposure to NU and Credicorp. The message is a more balanced book: high‑growth EM fintech paired with a fortress Canadian bank.

Consumer‑facing growth actually ticked down, with Consumer Discretionary slipping from 25.05% to 24.12% as positions in Amazon, Sea, Spotify, Netflix, Coupang, and others were trimmed. Health care eased from 7.41% to 6.88%, largely via the reduction in Royalty Pharma, even as they maintained strong gains in Intuitive Surgical and Dexcom.

Energy and the unclassified Kaspi.kz line remain small but slightly larger slices, reflecting opportunistic rather than thematic positions. The overall picture is a book still structurally pro‑tech, but increasingly anchored by cash‑flowing industrial and financial franchises.

Taken together, 2026‑Q2 looks like the moment Baillie Gifford decided that growth needs ballast. They are still an unapologetically long‑duration, innovation‑heavy shop, but they’re now explicit that the durable returns from AI, digital payments, and e‑commerce will accrue to platforms and infrastructure with pricing power, not just to whoever adds the most users.

The build‑out in NVIDIA, Broadcom, Apple, and Alphabet A sketches a multi‑year AI monetization stack: chips, bandwidth, devices, and ad/search platforms. Layered on top are industrial names like Axon, CRH, and RBC Bearings, which tie that digital backbone to physical‑world demand in public safety, construction, and manufacturing.

On the risk side, the book is less hostage to moonshot narratives in space, flying taxis, or unprofitable e‑commerce than it was a quarter ago. They’re willing to crystalize gains in mega‑cap consumer platforms and to admit when merchant‑of‑record or marketplace economics (Coupang, for example) don’t warrant as much capital.

For observers, the signal is clear: expect Baillie Gifford to keep owning high‑beta names, but with a growing emphasis on cash conversion, structural industry power, and balance between EM fintech and developed‑market banks. If the next leg of the cycle rewards AI infrastructure and hard assets more than pure software multiple expansion, this 13F suggests they’re already positioned for it.