Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its “Artisan Select Equity Fund” second-quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The fund’s Investor Class ARTNX, Advisor Class APDNX, and Institutional Class APHNX returned 6.77%, 6.76%, and 6.80%, respectively, in the second quarter, compared to a 10.94% return for the S&P 500 Index. In addition, you can check the top 5 holdings of the strategy to know its best picks in 2025.
In its second-quarter 2025 investor letter, Artisan Select Equity Fund highlighted stocks such as IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV). IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) is an analytical technology services and clinical research-providing company to the life sciences and healthcare industries. The one-month return of IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) was -5.90%, and its shares lost 24.23% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On September 26, 2025, IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) stock closed at $179.56 per share, with a market capitalization of $30.525 billion.
Artisan Select Equity Fund stated the following regarding IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) in its second quarter 2025 investor letter:
“We added IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) to the portfolio this quarter. IQV is the leader in the contract research organization (CRO) industry. CROs conduct clinical trials for large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Because of their scale and global operations, large CROs such as IQV can run clinical trials cheaper, faster and better than their clients can do themselves. This explains why CROs have been taking share from pharmaceutical companies’ internally run clinical trials for decades. Clinical trial outsourcing penetration 15 years ago was around 30% but is nowmorethan50%. Industry observers project it could eventually reach 70% or more as the pharmaceutical industry continues to manage its fixed cost base. Finding participants for clinical trials, running the trials and navigating the regulatory landscape is complex, expensive and time-consuming. IQV has about a 22% share of the CRO industry, followed by ICON and PPD (a unit of ThermoFisher), which each have 20%. The rest of the industry is fragmented across multiple players.
The financial characteristics of the industry are highly attractive. The need for and benefits of pharmaceutical innovation generally result in rising R&D spend and demand for clinical trials. The outsourcing trend adds another layer of growth on top. A fragmented industry also creates the opportunity for small and medium-sized acquisitions, which we assess to be generally value-creating in this industry. A decade ago, IQV generated about $700 million in EBITA. Today, it is around $3billion. Five years ago, the company earned under $6 a share in EPS, and we expect that it will earn about $11 a share this year. In short, this has been and we expect will continue to be a growing business. Return on equity this year should be around 30%, consistent with the past several years…”(Click here to read the full text)
IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. According to our database, 65 hedge fund portfolios held IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) at the end of the second quarter, down from 67 in the previous quarter. IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) reported record revenue of revenue of $4 billion in the second quarter. While we acknowledge the risk and potential of IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
In another article, we covered IQVIA Holdings Inc. (NYSE:IQV) and shared Broyhill Asset Management’s views on the company. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 2025 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
