Disclaimer: This blog post is not investment advice. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment decisions.
| Year | Vinh | S&P 500 |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 23.9 % | 34.8 % |
| 2017 | 3.1 % | 11.3 % |
| 2018 | 3.9 % | 1.2 % |
| 2019 | 22.6 % | 26.4 % |
| 2020 | 14.3 % | 14.7 % |
| 2021 | 30.8 % | 29.9 % |
| 2022 | −36.5 % | −7.8 % |
| 2023 | 127.7 % | 19.2 % |
| 2024 | 33.3 % | 26.7 % |
| 2025 (YTD to 30 Sep) | −5.7 % | 6.83 % |
| Total return since 2016 | 342.1 % | 325.4 % |
| CAGR since 2016 | 16.0 % | 15.6 % |
| Total return since 2018 | 246.1 % | 183.5 % |
| CAGR since 2018 | 16.8 % | 13.9 % |
Riding Out the Luxury Downturn
This year has been humbling. After the spectacular gains of 2023, our portfolio has given back some ground, finishing slightly down year-to-date. The chief culprit has been Prada Group, whose flagship label saw a decline in retail sales in the first half of 2025—even as the wider group managed to grow.
Behind this lies a deeper malaise across luxury markets. A Reuters report this summer estimated that nearly €200 billion of market value had evaporated from the sector amid a prolonged slowdown in Chinese demand. Soon after, Bain & Company cut its forecast for 2025 luxury sales to between −5 % and −2 %, warning that the market faces “more complex turbulence” after a 1 % decline in 2024. Little wonder that investors remain cautious.
And yet, within Prada, there are flashes of brilliance. Miu Miu—the company’s spirited younger sibling—has caught fire, with retail sales soaring 49 % year-on-year in the latest H1 2025 release, while the main Prada line softened. Management attributes this to Miu Miu’s creative vitality and sees further room for growth in leather goods. Taken together with steady performance across its other labels, Prada Group still achieved a 9 % revenue rise in H1 2025.
Our thesis remains unchanged: luxury is cyclical, and confidence in China will eventually return. When it does, the tide will lift all boats. Indeed, when LVMH surprised the market with stronger-than-expected Q3 results, European luxury stocks collectively added $80 billion in value—proof that sentiment can turn quickly.
And it’s not entirely inconceivable that Prada Group could reach €8 billion in revenue within the next three to five years. At that scale, we estimate the operating margin could approach 30 %, reflecting stronger mix, pricing power, and better operating leverage. Add to that the cash the group will accumulate along the way, and Prada’s equity value could reach around €40 billion — up from roughly €13 billion today.
That potential alone gives us real cause for optimism. The current softness in luxury may feel uncomfortable, but beneath it lies one of the most creative and operationally disciplined houses in the industry — one that we believe will emerge stronger when the next upcycle begins.
Macro Considerations: Rates and the Flood into AI
For valuation work, I begin with the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield. By the end of September 2025, it hovered around 4.12 %. Doubling that figure—a rule of thumb for discount rates—gives roughly 8 %.
Rates, however, are no longer the market’s sole obsession. The conversation has shifted toward another force altogether: artificial intelligence.
The Promise and Costs of AI
AI has also been a powerful productivity engine on a personal level. Within my own work, I’ve taken on an innovation remit focused on building tech solutions and AI applications.
At the platform level, the numbers are astonishing. In October 2025, Google revealed that AI Overviews in Search reach over 2 billion users, processing 1.3 quadrillion tokens per month—up from 980 trillion just a few months earlier. That kind of vertical growth is why token consumption, not hype, is our truest measure of AI’s trajectory.
To grasp what a world of agentic AI might demand, we ran the numbers.
Imagine 8 billion people by 2030, each using AI for 5 to 10 tasks per day. A moderately complex task might consume around 250 000 tokens, including sub-calls. That’s roughly 10⁹ to 2×10¹⁰ tokens per person per day, or 10¹⁶ to 2×10¹⁶ tokens globally each day—equating to 1.16×10¹¹ to 2.31×10¹¹ tokens per second.
Today’s H100-equivalent GPUs generate around 250–300 tokens per second. To serve that load would require ~0.39 billion to 0.93 billion GPUs—against an estimated ~4 million H100-equivalent AI GPUs installed globally today. The gap is staggering.
The capital cost is equally mind-bending. At $50 000 to $200 000 per GPU (including data-centre power and cooling), equipping 386 million GPUs implies $19 to $77 trillion in total spending; scaling to 926 million pushes that to $46 to $185 trillion. Compare that with the $371 billion of AI data-centre capex planned by eight hyperscalers for 2025, and it’s clear that future demand could be 50–500 times larger.
Dipping into AIM: A Fresh Opportunity
Having achieved success on the AIM market before — most notably with our investment in Hotel Chocolat Group — we’re once again drawn to a small-cap story that few follow but many will eventually notice.
Likewise Group, a fast-growing UK flooring distributor, operates in a space that is neither flashy nor glamorous — and perhaps that’s exactly why it’s so interesting. It’s an industry we knew little about initially, but we’ve followed its major competitor, Headlam Group, since 2018. Problems have been brewing there for some time, and they’ve paved the way for Likewise to emerge as a credible challenger.
From a standing start in 2017, Likewise has grown from zero to more than £150 million in revenue in seven years — capturing nearly 10 % of the entire UK flooring market. Dig a layer deeper and you see why it’s so fascinating: the UK flooring industry is worth around £2 billion, half of which (≈ £1 billion) is carpet. Roughly half of that segment caters to 3,000 independent retailers across the country. Headlam once held about 50 % of that carpet distribution market — a share now in decline — while Likewise, after eight years, has grown to nearly 20 %.
It’s a remarkable ascent in an overlooked industry that moves quietly beneath the radar of most investors. That’s just a teaser for now — we’ll share the full analysis in our final blog post of 2025, three months from today.
One idea at a time 