Robert van den Oever: Welcome to Morningstar. Here today, in Amsterdam, at the Morningstar Investment Conference 2022. With me here is Claudia Kruse, Chief Responsible Investment Officer from APG Asset Management.
Welcome. You have just shared with our audience how APG Asset Management handles engagement and active ownership. Can you outline for us and share how that works for our viewers?
Claudia Kruse: Yeah, thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure to be here. And yeah, so we are a fiduciary manager for Dutch pension funds and on their behalf invest their portfolio responsibly and engage with companies. And in terms of active ownership, it is something that applies to the entirety of the portfolio, so both the listed but also the private markets. And there's a range of tools available to investors, which include, of course, voting at shareholder meetings, engagement with investees, both in private markets and listed markets, then engagement with policymakers and setting standards, and then last but not least, also investing in solutions, so actively seeking to help address the challenges that are, for example, set out by the Sustainable Development Goals. And then, it is very much about deciding what it is that you do and don't want to be in the portfolio, and that can be partially exclusions, but it can also come as a result of an engagement set that didn't go the way we wanted it to go or simply the choice that by looking at in the context of the diamond of risk, return, cost, and sustainability, we decide that this particular company should not be in our portfolio.
And I focused on perhaps a number of themes. The importance of collaboration not only among investors, but with the entire ecosystem of companies, policymakers, NGO and also really scientists. And particularly, an emerging topic is biodiversity where there's real value in the different databases that are out there and real value in getting together and defining how can one measure biodiversity risk and how can one also help address biodiversity loss.
Van den Oever: And can you share with us some examples of the successes that you have made with the active ownership?
Kruse: Yeah. Perhaps one that I can highlight, which is very recently, is that we've been part of a collaborative engagement, and Samsung Electronics recently announced that they would pursue a net zero strategy by 2050, also making some other very strong commitments around their environmental strategy. Of course, it is always in the end – it is about what gets realized. But to see that commitment is what we would consider a good engagement.
Van den Oever: Okay. Thank you very much for sharing your views with us today.
Kruse: Thank you.