Co-owners,

We've spun the wheel for the Emerging Markets bucket. The ticker landed in Brazil, on the largest meat company on the planet. And then something happened that has never happened in this newsletter before.

We went to research the company, and discovered it had just left the bucket we drew it from.

For almost its entire life this was a Brazilian, emerging-market stock. In the past year it re-incorporated in the Netherlands, listed its main shares in New York, and FTSE Russell formally changed its index nationality from Brazil to the United States. As of this year, the index no longer counts it as an emerging market at all. It has moved house, from the emerging world to the developed one, without changing a single slaughterhouse. You still own it. It has simply been re-filed under a different flag.

The company is JBS. It is worth meeting for the food alone. The migration is the bonus.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns since inception in 1986 as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Brazil. Now incorporated in the Netherlands and listed in New York (NYSE: JBS), with receipts trading in São Paulo (B3: JBSS32).

Think about the last time you ate meat. A chicken breast from the supermarket. A burger. A slice of ham, a rasher of bacon, a Sunday roast. There is a good chance it passed through a JBS plant on its way to you, wearing a brand name you would never connect to a Brazilian parent: Seara, Friboi, Swift, Pilgrim's, Moy Park. JBS is the quiet layer between the farm and your fridge, and it is the biggest one there is.

A few key facts:

More on why a company this enormous makes surprisingly little cash in a moment.

At its simplest, JBS turns living animals into packaged protein, at a scale almost nobody else can match. Beef in the United States, Brazil and Australia. Chicken through Pilgrim's in America and Seara in Brazil. Pork across three continents. Then the parts of the animal you never think about: the hide becomes leather, the bones and tissue become collagen and pet food, the fat becomes biodiesel. Very little is wasted, because at ~$86 billion of revenue, the scraps are a business in their own right.

The invisible-brand trick is the interesting bit. In your supermarket you meet Seara ready meals, Swift beef, Moy Park chicken, Friboi steaks. On a menu you meet none of them by name. The product is everywhere and the parent is nowhere, which is precisely the kind of company this newsletter exists to point at.

Roughly ~51% of what JBS produces now comes out of the United States, and ~26% out of Brazil. Keep that first number in mind, because it is quietly the reason for the whole story.

In 1953, a rancher named José Batista Sobrinho started slaughtering an ox or two a day in Anápolis, in central Brazil, and selling the meat locally. The company's name is simply his initials. A few years later he won the contract to supply meat to the workers building Brazil's new capital, Brasília, and bought his first proper meatpacking plant.

From there the story is a shopping list. His sons took the company public in Brazil in 2007, then went hunting abroad, buying the American processor Swift that same year and taking control of the US chicken giant Pilgrim's Pride in 2009. Buy a rival, absorb it, buy the next one. It is the same engine we watched at the Danish freight forwarder DSV and the Canadian oil producer Canadian Natural: growth by acquisition, repeated for decades until you are the largest in the world.

There is a darker chapter, and it rhymes with one we have told before. When we covered Japan's Recruit Holdings, we met a company whose scandal helped topple a prime minister and that survived anyway. JBS did something similar to Brazil.

In 2017 the founding family admitted, through their holding company, to paying roughly R$600 million in bribes to nearly 1,900 politicians. The bombshell was an audio recording: one of the brothers secretly taped the sitting president, Michel Temer, appearing to condone hush money for a jailed politician. The leak triggered mass protests and nearly ended Temer's presidency. The family's holding company agreed to pay a fine of about R$10.3 billion (~US$3.2 billion), the largest of its kind in the world at the time, and later paid a further ~US$256 million to settle charges in the United States.

Most companies do not walk away from that. JBS did, and eight years later it walked onto the New York Stock Exchange.

This is where the migration comes in. In June 2025, JBS completed a long-delayed reorganisation. A new Dutch holding company, JBS N.V., was placed on top of the group, and its shares began trading in New York. The old Brazilian company, JBS S.A., became a subsidiary underneath.

Two things changed with it. First, control tightened: the new structure introduced two classes of share, and lifted the founding family's voting power from roughly 48% to around 85%, which drew objections from US legislators and governance watchdogs. Second, and the reason we drew a company that is no longer where we drew it, the listed entity is now incorporated in the Netherlands, trades mainly in New York, and produces most of its output in the United States. On those facts FTSE reassigned its index nationality from Brazil to the USA, and in mid-2026 it joined the Russell 3000, an American index. A Brazilian emerging-market champion, re-filed as a US developed-market stock, in the space of a year.

For all its scale, JBS is a hard business to love as a stock. It rides the animal cycle: in 2025 its American beef arm barely broke even, squeezed by the smallest US cattle herd in about seventy years, while chicken carried the group. Free cash flow, the money left after running the machine, collapsed from ~US$2.3 billion in 2024 to about ~US$400 million in 2025, and turned slightly negative in early 2026.

And the largest question of all sits upstream: JBS has faced years of scrutiny over cattle linked to Amazon deforestation and over its climate footprint. It points to its monitoring and reclamation spending; critics point out that the herds keep growing. Both are true, and if you own a world index fund you own that tension along with the beef.

We wanted to show you an emerging-market business hiding in plain sight. Instead we caught one in the act of ceasing to be emerging at all, stepping across the line from the developing world to the developed one while its plants kept humming exactly as before. The index is not a museum. It is a living thing, and companies grow up and change locations inside it.

The meat did not change. The flag did. And whichever bucket JBS sits in this quarter, a slice of the world's largest meat company was already on your plate, and already in your portfolio.

Data sourced from the JBS N.V. 2025 full-year results, the JBS N.V. Q1 2026 financial statements, the JBS institutional presentation (2026). Share data as of late-July 2026.

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Next week, we'll be looking at a company from North America.