Dear Investor,
The Infusive Global Consumer Fund delivered +4.33% in August, net of fees. The YTD return is +9.75% (Class A USD). This exceeds the MSCI Consumer Index by ~4%.
Please find below the August 2025 performance update for the Consumer Alpha Global Leaders Fund.
Consumer Alpha Global Leaders Fund – Factsheet August 2025
Infusive’s global team focuses exclusively on the consumer sector, covering discretionary, staples and digital. We use artificial intelligence (“AI”) to augment our investment process.
For more details on how we use AI visit our website and see a recent note from our CEO
Company Comments and Market Reactions
This earnings season revealed some of the starkest divergences we’ve seen in years. Companies beating expectations often enjoyed outsized rallies, while those missing were punished with sharp, sometimes double-digit, sell-offs.
At the heart of these divergences lies AI adoption. The gap between companies embedding AI into their models—and those that are not—has become the most pronounced we have observed in our careers. As the chart below shows, technology companies naturally led mentions of AI on Q2 earnings calls. Yet our analysis suggests non-tech businesses hold some of the richest untapped opportunities, with AI-driven growth and profitability not yet reflected in valuations. This is an incredibly exciting time for stock picking. We detail various aspects of this further.
From Digital Bookings to Emotional Journeys
The Changing Nature of Travel
The travel industry has always been shaped by waves of technology. In the early 2000s, the great disruption was digitalisation. Booking systems moved online, travel agents gave way to websites, and the emphasis was on infrastructure—speed, availability, and price transparency. This phase was transactional: drop-down menus, calendars, and search filters defined the booking experience.
Today, the industry is entering a different era. Travel is no longer just about finding a flight or hotel. Consumers increasingly want inspiration, personalisation, and experiences that feel unique to them. The focus is shifting from a purely functional digital process to an emotional journey, where technology serves as a bridge between aspiration and reality.
TUI’s Transformation
It is within this context that TUI stands out. Europe’s largest travel company ,with 22 million customers, 60,000 employees, its own fleet of planes, hotels, and cruise ships, sits at a unique intersection of the physical and digital. Unlike intermediaries that manage only parts of the booking journey, TUI owns the end-to-end customer experience—from inspiration through to the holiday itself and even post-trip engagement.
Recognizing this advantage, TUI has repositioned AI not as a tool for automation alone, but as infrastructure for the future of travel. The strategy increasingly appears to be about embedding AI across the business, in ways that enhance employee effectiveness and customer engagement.
Cultural Buy-In at Scale
The cultural element is striking. In just nine months, TUI has upskilled 33,000 employees through its “Embrace AI@TUI” program, while building an internal AI Assistants platform. This bottom-up approach has enabled staff to create over 2,000 AI tools tailored to their workflows.
The Infusive team noticed this shift not just in company materials, but in public behaviour. Increasingly, TUI employees referenced AI on LinkedIn, sharing examples of how they were using new tools and celebrating efficiency gains. To us, this signalled that TUI was embedding AI culturally across at a pace much faster than peers.
Rather than displacing jobs, the focus has been on replacing activities— improving efficiency by as much as 80% in some categories and freeing people to concentrate on higher-value interactions.
This employee empowerment has been complemented by customer-facing innovation. AI-powered search and recommendations have driven a 40% increase in app sales, now 10.5% of total bookings. Management has set an ambitious goal to reach 50%. Importantly, AI is changing the very nature of search: from functional inputs (dates, destinations) to inspiration-led discovery, underpinned by emotion.
The Broader Industry Shift
As Pieter Jordaan, TUI’s CIO, describes, “GenAI brings emotion into the experience, as opposed to a drop down with a date”. This reflects the structural evolution of the travel sector: digitalisation solved efficiency; AI aims to unlock personalisation.
Customer expectations are rising. People are increasingly willing to trust technology—just as they embraced Apple Pay for transactions, they may now accept an AI assistant that helps design their holiday. For travel companies, the ability to capture and use this information responsibly will be key.
Performance and Strategic Positioning
The strategy is becoming visible in financial results. TUI has raised guidance and reported record quarterly performance, with digital channels contributing directly to both revenue growth and margin enhancement. Higher-margin direct app bookings are offsetting some softness in traditional channels, while AI-driven personalization is supporting pricing power (ASP +3%).
TUI’s vision—to own the entire personalised travel journey—aligns with long-term industry dynamics. As global travel demand continues to structurally grow, the winners may be those able to combine scale, data ownership, and AI-enabled personalisation.
When we first purchased the shares, they were valued at about 6x earnings, with a high level of short interest (market participants betting the share price would fall). We thought this deep valuation discount to the market and peers was not a fair representation of the innovation in the business and the high barriers to entry TUI had developed over years of executing for customers. Despite an increase in the share price since that time, should the management team continue to execute, a significant rerating of the company over that period could be evidenced.
The story of travel is evolving from digital booking to emotional booking. TUI is positioning itself at the centre of this transition—leveraging its physical assets, data ecosystem, and cultural adoption of AI to redefine what travel looks like in the next decade.
Disney: AI as a Cultural Challenge
In recent ,months we’ve spoken about companies that appear to be benefitting from AI adoption. At the same time, we’ve seen just as many that struggle-not because of the technology itself, but because of the cultural change it requires.
Implementing AI is rarely about technical experts rebuilding an organisation from scratch. It is about shifting the way people think, work, and solve problems. For employees who have spent decades in a single role or domain, that shift can feel especially difficult.
Many companies still approach AI as a purely technical problem: hire engineers, build models, and hope the results materialise. Yet the real bottleneck often lies elsewhere.
This is what made a recent job posting at The Walt Disney Company
noteworthy. Disney advertised for a Vice President of Collaboration and AI—a title that highlights a growing recognition: that AI adoption is less about the code and more about culture.
The posting calls for someone to lead strategy and delivery of AI tools for knowledge workers, to create a roadmap and communications plan that guides employees to the right AI solutions, and to build a training and advocacy program that encourages adoption across the company. In other words, the role is not about building new models but about helping the organization use them.
This cultural lens aligns with comments Bob Iger made earlier this year at Disney?s AGM. He called AI “the most powerful technology that our company has ever seen, including its ability to enhance and enable consumers to access, experience and enjoy our entertainment.”
Taken together, the job posting and Iger’s remarks show how Disney is framing AI as both revolutionary and deeply human: a technology whose success will depend on whether employees, teams, and cultures are willing to adapt.
For investors, it serves as a reminder that AI adoption is not a uniform story of winners and losers. Instead, it is a process—one that requires both technical execution and cultural buy-in. We believe Disney can and will implement AI, which could unlock content creation at much faster rates than history. We note that the Chair of Disney, former Morgan Stanley boss, James Gorman, was instrumental in implementing AI into Morgan Stanley before peers, several years ago.
Walmart’s (Continued) Transformation Beyond Traditional Retail
Walmart’s evolution beyond traditional grocery retail is evident in its dual focus on general merchandise expansion and digital commerce acceleration, powered by sophisticated AI implementations. The company’s Sam’s Club division has delivered five consecutive quarters of positive comparable growth in general merchandise despite a deflationary environment, highlighting its ability to take share where many traditional retailers struggle.
The company’s aggressive push into premium general merchandise brands at disruptive price points represents a strategic pivot to capture higher-margin sales while maintaining its value proposition. This compelling value transcends typical grocery shopping.
Walmart’s digital transformation continues to be significant; within a competitive moat few traditional retailers can sustain. At current growth rates in general merchandise, our analysis suggests that the shares are incredibly attractive. The company was an early mover on AI (we first noticed it in their annual report in 2018). It has a neural network analysing 200 billion data points about member behaviour, ChatGPT Enterprise integration for field management that eliminated 200 million mundane tasks annually and personalized in-store AI-driven advertising that delivers what management describes as “insane” conversion rates.
Walmart’s Member Access Platform (MAP) advertising business, growing at 24% annually, leverages membership data to create closed-loop attribution systems that traditional grocers cannot match. This represents a high-margin revenue diversification strategy that capitalizes on Walmart’s unique position as both a physical and digital retail platform.
The company’s unit growth strategy differs significantly from traditional grocers, focusing on value-based volume growth rather than inflation-driven revenue increases. This unit-driven approach (evidenced by the 5.9% comparable sales growth in Q2 being entirely volume-based) creates a more sustainable growth trajectory less dependent on macroeconomic pricing factors.
Walmart’s strategic shift to targeting younger demographics—with Gen Z and Millennials representing their fastest-growing membership segments— positions the company to capture evolving consumer preferences. The increasing penetration of convenience-based shopping trips (versus traditional bulk purchases) demonstrates Walmart’s ability to adapt to changing consumer behaviours that many traditional grocers struggle to accommodate.
Perhaps most significantly, Walmart’s infrastructure integration between its flagship stores and Sam’s Club creates operational synergies in technology, supply chain, real estate, and transportation networks that enable rapid capability development without proportional capital investment. This enterprise-level approach to infrastructure allows Walmart to deploy innovations at a pace and scale that stand-alone retailers cannot match, creating durable competitive advantages across both physical and digital retail channels.
For more information, contact the Infusive Team.