Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Strategy

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) sells semiconductors, systems, and software for accelerated computing, gaming, and generative AI.
Computing demand has been doubling every one to two years, driven by electrification, digitization, and recent advancements in AI, yet supply growth has decelerated dramatically due to the slowdown in Moore's law. NVIDIA’s accelerated computing architecture enables continued growth in computing capacity through parallelization. We are at the tipping point of a new era in computing, with NVIDIA at its epicenter as generative AI adoption grows. With leading market share in gaming, data centers, and autonomous machines, we think NVIDIA is well positioned for long-term growth.

Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) owns Facebook, the world's largest social network, with over 3.0 billion monthly and over 2.1 billion daily active users. Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Oculus are also part of the Meta Platforms network, with over 3.4 billion total daily unique users across Meta products.
Meta owns unique social platforms with users that continue to demonstrate stickiness and high engagement. Advertisers want to be where users are, and Meta's ability to analyze, target, and show clear, demonstrable, and rising returns on investment makes the platform particularly attractive to them. We believe the company has significant room to further monetize its vast customer base, especially internationally. In addition, we see significant positive optionality from monetization opportunities in generative AI features, video, WhatsApp, and business messaging.

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) is an e-commerce pioneer, innovator, and market share leader with a relentless focus on providing value and convenience to its customers. Amazon also operates the industry-leading cloud infrastructure business Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon's market share of U.S. online retail sales is around 40%, while its share of global retail sales is less than 5%. Amazon has many avenues for revenue growth, including consumer staples, international expansion, digital media offerings, private label, pharmacy and health care services, advertising, and a better shopping experience powered by generative AI. Amazon also represents an opportunity to invest in the secular growth of cloud computing through AWS—a large, fast-growing, and margin-accretive part of the business.

Shopify Inc. (SHOP) is a cloud-based software provider offering an operating system for multi-channel commerce. The company serves over 2 million merchants that processed $292 billion of gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2024. Shopify is the second-largest e-commerce player in the U.S., as measured by GMV.
Shopify offers a scalable, end-to-end commerce platform that serves merchants of all sizes, including offline, international, and B2B businesses. Its aggregate scale, innovation, and ecosystem of partners enable merchants to take payments, receive loans, and sell products internationally. Shopify's access to real-time, transaction-level data across a broad merchant base strengthens its competitive position and allows it to share the benefits of scale directly with its customers. With less than 2% share of $20 trillion in global commerce, it has a long runway for growth.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSM), known as TSMC, is the world's largest independent semiconductor foundry, manufacturing chips on behalf of other companies.
TSMC is the dominant force in leading-edge semiconductor foundry manufacturing, as it benefits from economies of scale and a superior cost structure. Its successful track record of deploying new technology faster than competitors helps it maintain market share and pricing power. We believe TSMC’s investments in advanced nodes will strengthen its market leadership and support long-term profitability.

Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) is the parent of Google, the world's most dominant online search provider. Other services and products include display advertising, Android, Chrome, Google Cloud, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube. Its Other Bets segment consists of businesses such as Waymo, CapitalG, and Verily.
Alphabet has been the largest beneficiary of a secular shift in advertising from all other media to online and mobile. Alphabet has processed and indexed more data than any other company and can leverage its large datasets to quickly improve its products and enter adjacent markets. Subsidiaries Google Cloud and YouTube give Alphabet exposure to the secular shifts to cloud computing and connected TV. Alphabet has tremendous scale, distribution, and talent. We are monitoring how generative AI could disrupt or offer new opportunities for the core search business.

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) manufactures electric vehicles, including a sedan, CUV, pickup truck, and semi-truck. The company is also ramping up internal battery cell production, energy solutions, robotics offerings such as full self-driving and humanoids, and renewable energy generation and storage solutions.
We expect Tesla will continue to grow its automotive business as it benefits from the secular adoption of electric vehicles, its vertical integration, technological innovation, and cost advantage. Tesla is also leveraging its core automotive technologies to address the rapidly growing energy storage segment. In addition, Tesla's software and AI expertise is broadening the industrial opportunity to large and profitable revenue avenues that were previously locked in the legacy vehicle architecture, such as autonomous driving, robotics, insurance, and other AI use cases.

MercadoLibre, Inc. (MELI) is the largest e-commerce company in Latin America. The company operates the MercadoLibre e-commerce marketplace, the Mercado Pago fintech platform, and the Mercado Envios suite of shipping solutions for sellers on its platform.
MercadoLibre benefits from the emergence of two secular trends: e-commerce and digital payments. The company has a significant first-mover advantage and is investing aggressively in logistics to widen its competitive moat. Latin America is a predominantly cash-based economy with e-commerce penetration under 20%, and MercadoLibre has an attractive, asset-light marketplace business model. We believe its logistics network is a key competitive advantage, and we see a significant opportunity in the growth of its fintech offerings.

Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) offers enhanced security and performance for websites, apps, and SaaS. Its network spans over 100 countries and connects with over 10,000 ISPs, cloud providers, SaaS providers, and enterprises. Its edge network operates within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the developed world.
Cloudflare's technology is 30% to 50% cheaper than that of peers, while its gross margins are 1,000 to 2,000 basis points higher. It is widely respected among developers, who migrate it from personal to enterprise use. These advantages allow Cloudflare to service about 25% of global internet traffic. We believe Cloudflare will maintain 25%-plus growth for several years given its unique technology and go-to-market strategy that is disrupting a $40 billion market, along with the potential to attack a nascent Edge Computing market that could grow to $10 billion in four years.

KKR & Co. Inc. (KKR) is one of the world's leading alternative asset managers. The company manages more than $600 billion in assets, with large franchises in private equity, real assets, and credit. KKR also owns a large retirement insurance company, Global Atlantic.
KKR has strong franchises in alternative asset management, having successfully diversified from its buyout roots into private equity, credit, and real assets. These strategies are in early stages of maturation, positioning KKR to raise over $300 billion from 2024 to 2026 and eventually grow assets under management to more than $1 trillion. KKR also owns an insurer, Global Atlantic, which should continue compounding as it leverages KKR's asset sourcing capabilities, driving growth in both fee and spread earnings.

Total