Low valuations and founder management are attractive to RV Capital’s Rob Vinall China will be in focus this week as the country’s president, Xi Jinping, travels to Washington for a summit with U.S. Artificial intelligence is expected to be a major topic as the world’s two biggest economies jostle for leadership in the burgeoning technology. But one area where the U.S. is currently distinctly on top is stock-market performance.
The S&P 500 is up 11.8% in 2026, but the Shanghai Composite is down 0.5%. To Rob Vinall, that spells opportunity. The Englishman, who once worked at Goldman Sachs, is the founder and managing director of investment fund RV Capital, whose Business Owner Fund has delivered a 15.5% annualized return since its launch in 2008.
Vertiv Is Looking Decades Ahead as the Stock Surges Play video: Vertiv Is Looking Decades Ahead as the Stock Surges In a wide-ranginginterview with William Green on the Investor’s Podcast Network, released this weekend, Vinall explains how he was inspired to start his fund after attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha, Neb., in 2006 and finding it “a life-changing experience.” He had taught himself value investing during the dot-com crash and he says that rather than focusing mainly on price-to-earnings or price-to book multiples he evaluates business by what he terms an “owner return” target of 15% per year, which is calculated as cash yield plus long-term earnings growth. Vinall also values companies where founder CEOs consider the companies their life’s work — a reason why he praises Meta Platforms Mark Zuckerberg. He also prefers companies with business moats that are narrow but widening over those that are big and static, because the latter “can create complacency…and can prevent you from sort of adapting and changing as the world evolves.” With this investment philosophy in mind Vinall has piled into Chinese stocks since 2024, with the country now representing about a third of RV Capital’s portfolio.
Vinall’s travels in China have convinced him that the country is “moving very rapidly in the right direction and from an investing perspective, what makes it interesting is that the perception for most of those last 20 years, perhaps even still today, has been very negative.” That’s an exciting set-up, he thinks. In particular, Vinall says that when he returned to China after COVID restrictions were lifted he found an economy with burgeoning innovation and world-class companies, not just in manufacturing but in consumer internet and e-commerce, among other areas. The four main China stocks that Vinall holds are Luckin Coffee , Tencent , H World Group , and Yum China .
All of those are still run by their founders, says Vinall, and they also have wide moats to their businesses. He expects them to have earnings growth of at least 10% in coming years, some with more than that, and most of them are returning 5% if not more of their capital in every year in terms of dividends and share buybacks. This gets him “very comfortably” to the 15% owner return that he targets.
And, he emphasizes, a key reason for buying them is that the country’s stocks remain out of favor “and you get very obviously good companies growing nicely in incredibly attractive valuations.” Cheap valuations, he stresses, are the reason above any other why he feels confident investing in China. To illustrate that point, the estimated price to earnings multiple for the S&P 500 for the end of 2026 is around 21.1 and for the MSCI China it is 11.4, according to FactSet. With regards to the U.S. market, Vinall commented in June that it was “the weirdest market I’ve ever seen,” as the S&P 500 continued to make record highs — driven by momentum-based hardware/AI plays — but most of the stocks he looked at were some 50% below their peaks.
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