Lindt & Sprüngli doesn’t actually have much in common with Galderma. The chocolate group can look back on a long tradition: it was 125 years ago that Sprüngli, founded as a small confectionery store in Zurich in 1845, took over the Berne chocolatier Rud. Lindt & Söhne. The merger of the two pioneers is regarded as the birth of what is now a global company, which has been listed on the Swiss stock exchange since 1986. Galderma, on the other hand, has been on the listings for just shy of eight months, the dermatology specialist making its début on the SIX on 22 March. The roots of the skincare specialist stretch back to 1981, when food giant Nestlé and the French cosmetics group L’Oréal launched Galderma as a joint venture. Lately this odd couple have had one significant thing in common: both Lindt & Sprüngli and Galderma have made their way onto the FuW Swiss 50 Index, with the pair taking the places of Bachem and Banque Cantonale Vaudoise.
The reshuffle occurred in the rebalancing process, when the Fuw Swiss 50 Index is put on the test bench twice a year, in spring and autumn. The regular check-up is considered one of the usual features of a stock market index. In another aspect the barometer, designed by “Finanz und Wirtschaft” magazine, or FuW for short, differs markedly from the SMI: the editorial team of the respected publication has created an index that reflects the Swiss economy and its leading listed companies in as diversified a manner as possible. In introducing this innovation it was responding to the marked orientation of the Swiss Market Index towards Nestlé, Novartis and Roche. Although the Swiss stock market now limits the weighting of any one share to 18%, the trio together account for almost half the leading domestic barometer. The FuW Swiss 50 Index circumvents this clustering risk, as it is known, by significantly limiting the proportion of individual stocks.
Taking one thing at a time, only shares which achieve an average daily trading volume of at least CHFmn 5 over a period of one and six months are considered for inclusion in the select 50. All stocks that make it over this hurdle are sorted according to their free-float market capitalisation. The 50 companies with the highest stock market values are included in the FuW Swiss 50 Index. The shares in the first 25 places of the ranking are given a weighting of 2.7%, while those in the bottom half of the table go into the FuW Swiss 50 Index with a 1.3% weighting each. This practice results in much greater diversification. Not only that, but this barometer contains 30 more Swiss companies than the SMI, which “only” has 20 shares. The structure of the FuW Swiss 50 Index, which came into being in summer 2022, works: over a twelve-month view, the innovative benchmark has posted growth – including dividends – of around one fifth. That means the index has outperformed the SMI TR Index by 4 percentage points.
This discrepancy also has something to do with the crisis engulfing Nestlé. The large cap shed 20% of its value in the period under review, bringing up the rear in the leading Swiss index. While Novartis and Roche are among the winners, the two pharmaceutical stocks were unable to make up for Nestlé's weakness. Returning to Lindt & Sprüngli and Galderma, in the short term the two newcomers to the FuW Swiss 50 Index have nothing in common in terms of performance either. Things are going swimmingly for Galderma, with the share trading at 60% above its IPO price. By contrast, the chocolate manufacturer has been lagging behind so far in 2024. Even Lindt & Sprüngli’s impressive summer figures were unable to do anything about the weak performance. The domestic mid cap has obviously been caught up in the maelstrom of a weak food sector. The company could return to investors’ focus as the Christmas season approaches. Whether advent calendars, Santa Claus figures, Lindor truffles or fine pralines, Lindt & Sprüngli brings a wide spectrum of speciality sweets to the party. In that respect, the timing of its inclusion in the FuW Swiss 50 Index could be very propitious.
Fuw Swiss 50 Index vs. iShares SMI ETF(weightings in %)
Source: FuW, Leonteq AG