There was much to dissect in a couple of sets of annual results - from two big players on the Scottish corporate scene - in recent days.

Insight can sometimes be conspicuous by its absence when some company leaders hold forth with a kind of buzzword soup of which an artificial intelligence engine would be proud, if it were programmed for such an emotion.

Against this backdrop, the thoughts of the stewards of the two aforementioned venerable Scottish companies came as a breath of fresh air.

Notably, there was an emphasis on long-term thinking from both.

The managers of the £2.74 billion Monks Investment Trust, which launched on February 6, 1929, gave their thoughts on the AI revolution in the context of what is going on with the portfolio as the fund’s annual results were published last Wednesday.

They flagged gains from Monks’ holdings in global companies controlling “key pinch points” amid bottlenecks in the AI hardware build-out.

This included the highlighting of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Back in 2017, I visited Central Taiwan Science Park in Taichung and the scale of TSMC’s operations there, just one of its locations across this island democracy of 23 million people, was remarkable indeed.

TSMC has begun construction of a massive new fabrication plant in Taichung as its business booms. The scale of that will no doubt be extremely impressive when it is completed.

Baillie Gifford’s Michael Taylor, Malcolm MacColl and Helen Xiong said in their managers’ review of Monks’ annual........

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