the Industrials sector was the largest relative contributor, followed by Health Care and Consumer Discretionary. The Communication Services and Real Estate sectors detracted from performance.
Our Industrials investments returned 3.9%, well above the sector’s return of -2.4% in the index. Aerospace and defense holdings drove outperformance, as the group rallied amid war in Eastern Europe, tensions in the South China Sea, and rising defense budgets in the West. Overweight positions in General Dynamics and Raytheon Technologies were key individual contributors. Our overweight position in Quanta Services, which builds electric utility facilities and power grid infrastructure, also supported relative returns. The company continues to benefit from the rising need for electricity production and transmission.
Our Health Care investments outperformed the benchmark’s sector return by two percentage points. The sector rallied in March after a down start to the year, as investors returned to a group often seen as a haven from geopolitical tensions, inflation, and bond-market downturns. AbbVie, the global, research-based biopharmaceutical company spun out of Abbott Laboratories, was among the largest overall individual contributors, advancing 20.9%. AbbVie rallied on the back of solid revenue growth in 2021, despite lacking a major COVID-19 product. While it stands to lose patent protection for a key drug (Humira) in 2023, sales of the company’s other immunology drugs, Rinvoq and Skyrizi, posted strong growth. We like AbbVie’s rich dividend and its pipeline going forward, including an Alzheimer’s disease treatment from the recent acquisition of Syndesi Therapeutics. The Fund also benefited from our overweight in managed care stocks. Both UnitedHealth Group and Centene Corporation are players in the Medicare Advantage business, and advanced sharply when the program’s 2023 reimbursement rates were better than expected and the largest increase in more than 10 years.
On the downside, our investments in Communication Services weighed on relative performance, returning -14.2% and trailing the sector’s -11.9% benchmark decline. Our overweight in Facebook parent Meta Platforms was a notable driver of underperformance. Shares declined sharply after Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings, reported in February, disappointed investors. An outlook for lower revenue growth, more competition, and a large, multi-year investment in the Metaverse sparked a market cap loss of approximately $232 billion in a single day, the largest drop ever recorded. Despite the pullback, we continue to like the company’s core business and view the stock’s valuation as quite attractive. Meta now trades at 18 times expected 2022 earnings and 15 times 2023 earnings.
For the three months ended March 31, 2022, the total return on the Fund’s net asset value (“NAV”) per share (with dividends and capital gains reinvested) was -4.2%. This compares to a -4.6% total return for the S&P 500 and a -5.0% total return for the Morningstar U.S. Large Blend category over the same time period. The total return on the market price of the Fund’s shares for the period was -4.7%.