05 Aug 2026
Sometimes you have to go to the mountain to get the answers you need.
I’m standing at the top of one of Europe’s snowy crests, feeling somewhat underdressed in my smooth-soled office shoes. I look across to the neighbouring peaks – there’s the Eiger, the Mönch – and I wonder: was it worth the considerable sum I paid to travel up this mountain?
It’s an obvious but crucial question to answer if I’m to recommend to Fidelity’s investment managers the company that manages this trip. And it’s the sort of question that I can only answer by coming and testing the tourist’s experience myself.
The company, Jungfraubahn, is in many ways a textbook small cap: relatively unheard of, less covered by analysts, not on many investors’ radars.
But it is on mine. Jungfraubahn has the potential to be a proverbial hidden gem because of the premium tourist experience it offers – and charges for. Guests can enjoy extraordinary views along the journey, stop at bars and restaurants dotted along the mountainside, buy watches from celestial Rolex outlets, and walk through an ice palace built within the mountain’s glacier.
Outside of Switzerland, the Jungfrau mountain is probably better known to Asian audiences than European. Travel operators in the region often bundle a visit to the Jungfrau into European package holidays alongside iconic destinations like the Eiffel Tower and Colosseum. The Asian clientele can be seen throughout the small Swiss town of Interlaken at the base of the mountain, piling into luxury shops and taking selfies by horse-drawn carriages.
The company is clearly capitalising on this channel, with developments like the Korean restaurant I saw under construction about halfway up the mountain.
Jungfraubahn’s burgeoning status as a ‘must-see’ European attraction, coupled with its well-heeled customer base, speaks to the opportunity here. Last year the company made around a third of Disneyland Paris’s revenues from about a sixteenth of the customers. My questions focus on the sustainability of that model – will they continue to get enough visitors? Can they attract more diverse visitors even in off-peak months? Are they making the most of the operation? Running a high-cost tourist attraction up the side of a mountain could leave the company exposed to the elements.
As a small-cap equity analyst, you want to know:
Companies reliant on international travel are cyclical by nature and I need to understand its resilience. I’m here with my colleague, portfolio manager Andrea Fornoni. He has visited before and notices there are fewer tourists than last time. Is that a temporary consequence of travel disruption stemming from the Middle East conflict? Or something more fundamental?
Now, at the top of the mountain, I’ve formed some half-answers for myself. I’m reassured by the infrastructure, which looks and smells new. The experience feels expensive. But I’m concerned that the company is missing revenue opportunities. I struggled to find anywhere to buy a coffee, and after a day spent ascending thousands of feet, I would have paid good money to get one.
I also wonder about prospects for further growth. It’s useful that I’m joined on this trip by my fellow small-cap analyst Ed Bottomley, who focuses on industrials companies. Carrying thousands of tourists a day to the top of Europe is no mean engineering feat. Ed and I discuss the likely cost and feasibility of further building, and how this will influence the financials of the business in the future.
We meet the company’s chief executive, Oliver Hammel, who stresses the ways he hopes to improve revenues.
“Where I think we have potential to improve is dynamic pricing. In the sense that at high seasons, or when a lot of guests come all at once, we increase our prices, and we try to lower prices when we have more capacity free,” he tells us.
And the clientele? He says that he’s keen to diversify the company’s visitor base. The idea is not to “rely on one region in the world,” he explains, but to “have [visitors from] multiple regions; from the US to Indonesia to Japan,” which has the added bonus that they “all [have] slightly different travel times.”
It’s been a long day. Andrea, Ed, and I board a train back down into the valley.
I look at the mountain and spare a thought for other analysts who spend their days researching the same mega stocks as everyone else. For every Big Tech company out there, there are a thousand companies of Jungfraubahn’s size, most of which will only have one or two analysts covering them. That, to my mind, makes it even more worthwhile coming to see what they’re missing.
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