Introduction
Within the Jupiter Global Leaders strategy, digitalisation and automation represent a long-term structural theme with tangible real-world outcomes for the planet. Improvements in productivity sit at the centre of this opportunity. We live in a world where global demand and consumption continuously rise, but with only finite resources such as water and raw materials.
By enabling organisations to produce more with fewer inputs, digitalisation and automation solutions can enable productivity gains, while reducing the intensity of planetary impact. The Jupiter Global Leaders strategy has a ten-year investment horizon, which allows us to identify companies with financial durability and strategic, long-term investments. These companies typically not only improve their own operational efficiencies but enable corporates and consumers globally to use resources more effectively.
Scarcity Matters
Global GDP has a long-term average growth rate of 3.0%1 which serves as a reasonable estimate for future expectations. However, the world operates in a capacity constrained environment with regard to the availability of natural resources.
Water scarcity is a critical challenge that companies and industries must face. For example, the gap between global freshwater supply and demand is expected to reach 40% by 20302, while an estimated $70 trillion of global GDP will be exposed to high water stress by 20503.
Source: Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas
Meanwhile, global energy consumption is projected to increase by 40 to 50% between 2024 and 20504, a trajectory that has accelerated in recent years with the rapid growth of power-intensive data centres and artificial intelligence workloads.
Earth Overshoot Day provides a useful illustration, which marks the date in each calendar year when humanity’s resource use exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in a year. In 2025, this day fell on 24 July, highlighting the persistent gap between economic activity and environmental limits5. In the last fifty years, we have seen a broadly consistent relationship with increased population, economic output and shortfall of planetary reserves.
In aggregate, sustaining global economic output while operating within the constraints of finite resources, requires companies to identify and deliver ongoing productivity gains.
The following sections outline examples of a range of strategy holdings that are leading, in our view, in long term sustainability.
Digitalisation and Energy Efficiency
One of the most influential industries driving global productivity gains is the semiconductor industry, and the Jupiter Global Leaders strategy holds a position in one of its most significant companies – the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is the largest semiconductor foundry in the world.
Largely, innovation has focussed on getting more from less. This has meant that the semiconductor chips have got significantly smaller – with the size of chips being reduced to a current design target of 2 nanometres (nm). To give some context, this is 40,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. On a 2nm chip, the transistor density is equivalent to 300 million transistors per square millimetre. The complexity and barriers to entry are colossal.
As the chips have become vastly more complex, TSMC has cemented its global leadership and has successfully translated Moore’s Law from an engineering principle into industrial reality.
Moore’s Law describes advances in semiconductor manufacturing enable an increase in the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip. While often framed in terms of computing power, one of its most important real-world outcomes has been energy efficiency. Over time, the amount of computation that can be delivered per unit of energy has historically doubled roughly every 18 months6 enabling sustained reductions in the energy intensity of digital innovation. This has resulted in meaningful real-world reductions in electricity use.
Its deep technological advantage has been built over decades of innovation, underpinned by its methodical approach to research and development (R&D) and significant capital expenditure investments, which have totalled nearly $200 billion over the past decade7.
The latest 2nm chips can reduce power consumption by approximately a third compared to the previous iteration8. This is particularly attractive for energy-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence chips, where electricity use is a key cost and performance constraint.
In 2024, products manufactured by TSMC for its 500+ customers contributed to global electricity savings of 141 billion kWh. Analysis by the Industrial Technology Research Institute estimates that by 2030, for every kWh of electricity that TSMC consumes in production, it is projected to help reduce electricity consumption by 6.39 kWh across other industries and daily use globally, delivering a cumulative saving of 351.4 billion kWh9. For context, that is the equivalent of over 130 million households per annum10, or more than 1% of global electricity demand11.
With a clear energy efficiency tailwind, this is also an industry that faces a severe water scarcity headwind. Semiconductor manufacturing is highly water intensive; it requires large volumes of ultra-pure water in the manufacturing process, which is imperative to ensure there are no impurities in the semiconductors that would impact quality, performance and technological efficacy. Access to water is an operational imperative. In order to safeguard its resilience, TSMC has achieved a high process water recycling rate of 88% by designing water reuse directly into fabrication operations through advanced on-site water recovery and reclamation systems. Water is treated and reused multiple times within manufacturing, supported by rigorous process controls and the integration of reclaimed municipal water, allowing freshwater intake to be minimised without compromising yields or reliability. In 2024 alone, it conserved an additional 5.5 million cubic metres of water12.
Industrial Automation
Industrial automation is a key structural growth allocation across the strategy, with holdings such as Siemens, Keyence and Hexagon. These companies combine advanced hardware with software and data-driven solutions to enhance operational efficiency, increase output while delivering time and labour savings and lowering energy consumption across production processes. The examples below illustrate how these benefits are realised in practice by customers delivering real-world outcomes.
Siemens
Siemens is a global leader in industrial automation with over 300,000 employees. The company provides a combination of hardware and software solutions for automating factories, machines and production processes. Collectively, as of 2025, Siemens’ cumulative customers avoided emissions stood at 694 million metric tonnes of CO2e13, the equivalent of about 1.5% of global emissions.
There are multiple examples of tangible real-world outcomes, such as in high precision machine tools which help reduce energy consumption, enhance productivity with 40% faster ramp-up times, and reduce unproductive testing, leading to greater efficacy throughout the business cycle14.
Water efficiency technology is also an area of specialism, with end use examples including:
- A Swedish water company uses a combination of Siemens’ SIWA Leak Finder and its Sitrans sensor to detect leaks as small as 0.2 litres per second, preventing water losses by up to 50%, safeguarding water supply to critical infrastructure. Similarly, a UK-based ater utility uses SIWA Blockage Predictor to predict blockages with up to 90% accuracy in the wastewater system, identifying issues before they escalate such as sewer overflows polluting the environment.
- BlueScope, a global steel manufacturer, saved over 2,000 hours of unplanned downtime over a three-year period by utilising Siemens Senseye predictive maintenance system. The technology combines real-time data and AI-driven analytics to detect signs of equipment degradation earlier - enabling predictive maintenance rather than reactive15.
Keyence
Keyence is a global leader in vision systems used for factory automation. Vision systems leverage cameras and sensors, allowing machines to “see” the physical world. They are critical to enabling factory automation, acting as a key building block for quality control, error detection, tracking, robot guiding, alignment and assembly.
- Innovation in UV laser coders that do not require consumables or regular replacements such as ink ribbons reduce downtime and increase production efficiency. UV has multiple advantages, for example markings will not disappear with rubbing or friction, which helps deter tampering and counterfeiting, ensuring product authenticity and traceability which is critical in pharmaceutical end-markets.
- Low-cost vision systems technology can be used in line scans, effectively a smart camera which enables manufacturing inspection, with examples of efficacy enhancement of inspection time per part from 60 seconds to just two seconds, increasing output and reducing labour costs. Another simple but highly effective example is a small food facility site which saw false rejects drop by 80% by simply installing a smart camera to detect underfilled packages16.
- High-definition microscopes are critical in the production of semiconductors. As discussed above, in the section on TSMC, ever-smaller semiconductor chips require complex equipment. Traditionally, R&D teams have had to rely on multiple measurement devices such as 2D measurement microscopes and Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEMs). Keyence has developed a 4K ultra-high accuracy microscope, the VHX-7000, offering a depth of field 20 times higher than optical microscope, a magnification of minute features to 6000x and a motorised resolution increase of 33% alongside shadow reduction technology. This is a world first in ultra-high definition that is critical for greater efficiency in semiconductor inspection17.
Hexagon
Hexagon makes advanced measurement hardware and visualisation software technology to help digitise the physical world. The company has multiple segments that enable high precision measurement, described as reality capture, positioning and advanced robotics.
This capability ranges from the simple measurement of temperature and water levels to 3D mapping over 800,000 km2 of Planet Earth. More than 3.5 million agriculture vehicles use Hexagon’s technology. This enables companies to make their processes more energy-, waste-, time-, and cost-efficient whilst increasing safety18.
Core to Hexagon’s proposition are “digital twins”, which create a digital replica of a physical object, process or system that is continuously updated with real-world data from sensors. As an example, Hexagon’s digital twins enabled a multinational construction company to digitally scan a 23-storey building in just two days, versus one to two weeks using traditional methods.
Digital twins enable customers to monitor, simulate and optimise performance in real time, supporting predictive maintenance, reducing costs and downtime, while also enabling safety improvements, emissions reduction and virtual testing before physical changes are made.
Research from the company shows that 62% of respondents believe there is immense value delivered from the technology. Of respondents with a structured system to track a return on investment (ROI), 92% of respondents see an ROI of more than 10%. Similarly, the research found that digital twins deliver an average cost saving of 19%, and 80% report that technology is helping reduce their carbon emissions19.
Conclusion
In a world defined by rising demand and finite resources, productivity is a structural necessity. The examples above illustrate how technological progress supports measurable real-world outcomes: lower energy intensity, reduced water use and waste, and supporting increased productivity. These are tangible efficiency gains that have the potential to compound across economies and directly mitigate planetary constraints.
In our view, there is a structural opportunity on a multi-decade forward basis for long-term investment in companies leading in their specialisms.
Footnotes
1Source: World Bank, 1975-2024
2Source: Bloomberg Intelligence, Global Commission on the Economics of Water, 2025
3Source: Bloomberg Intelligence, World Resources Institute, 2025
4Source: International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration - https://evs.institute/sustainable-natural-resource-management/global-energy-demand-supply-trends-challenges/#forecasting-energy-needs-through-2050
5Source: https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/
6Source: Koomey, 2011 - https://gwern.net/doc/cs/hardware/2011-koomey.pdf
7Source: Bloomberg, 2015-2024
8Source: Bloomberg Intelligence, 2026
9Source: TSMC 2024 Sustainability Report: https://esg.tsmc.com/en-US/file/public/2024-TSMC-Sustainability-Report-e.pdf
10Source: Ofgem, 2026 (average UK home)- https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/information-consumers/energy-advice-households/average-gas-and-electricity-use-explained
11Source: World in Data and Ember, 2024 - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-demand?ta
b=line&country=USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~IND~BRA~OWID_WRL#sources-and-processing
12Source: TSMC 2024 Sustainability Report: https://esg.tsmc.com/en-US/file/public/2024-TSMC-Sustainability-Report-e.pdf
13Source: Siemens Impact 2025 - https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:d051e5f1-
7161-4739-be26-4ee0e3923aed/siemens-sustainability-impact.pdf
15Source: https://news.siemens.com/en-us/bluescope-predictive-maintenance/
17Source: Case Studies : Ensuring Semiconductor Quality by Getting Up Close | KEYENCE UK & Ireland
18Source: https://bynder.hexagon.com/m/6128ae7405f6a314/original/Hexagon-Corporate-Presentation.pdf
19Source: Hexagon – The Digital Twin Industry Report, 2024
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