Sustainable investing is in our DNA. We began our sustainable investing journey over 20 years ago and published our first global Responsible Investing Report in 2018. As we aim to drive transparency and performance across our sustainable investment approach and beyond, we are broadening the focus this year by publishing our first full Sustainability Report. It encompasses not only how we invest, but also how we operate and engage with stakeholders as a sustainable company. The broader remit of this condensed report reflects a shift in how investors are thinking. They rightly want to know that companies’ commitment to sustainability – including our own – is more than skin deep.
This condensed report shows our overarching activities – for our clients, employees and society – as an active asset manager to help protect and enhance our clients’ wealth. It also highlights key achievements in 2019. We can only achieve our purpose by putting sustainability at the core of our activities and the way we create value.
This condensed report provides insights into how sustainability is embedded in our strategy and approach building a growth driver in our investing activities. It also looks at the ways in which Allianz Global Investors is contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Proprietary ESG research and analysis is a key element of our sustainable investing approach. This ensures we are not overly reliant on external research and can seek to generate independent and differentiated insights on ESG topics ahead of the market, while ensuring full transparency internally. This informs and helps to intensify our active stewardship activities, whether relating to our engagement with companies, or our proxy voting record.
At Allianz Global Investors , we have grown the volume of the sustainable investments we manage from around EUR 25 billion to EUR 165 billion over the three years to the end of 2019. The largest proportion of these assets – 80% – are a result of our push towards integrating ESG into the opportunity and risk management of all portfolios. In 2019, Allianz Global Investors’ sustainably managed assets grew by around EUR 20 billion, or 14%, across the categories Integrated ESG, SRI (Sustainable and Responsible Investing) [p.26], SDG-aligned and Impact investing.
Increasingly, investors are looking for investments that combine a financial return with a positive contribution to wider societal objectives, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). At Allianz Global Investors we see this as growth driver and– on the back of our track record with Global Water investments – are now introducing a new, SDG-aligned segment in our sustainable investment offering.
Climate concerns have also emerged as an important theme in proxy voting; in an analysis by ShareAction, an NGO, on how global asset managers deal with climate-related shareholder proposals, AllianzGI was ranked 2nd out of 57 asset managers. Our Sustainability Report takes a closer look at how the financial implications of climate change can be assessed.
Beyond generating long-term financial returns for our clients, we strive to manage the potential impact of our operations – both positive and negative – on society, local communities and the environment. We believe we have a responsibility to lead by example, by demonstrating the standards and commitments we expect of the companies we invest in. A dedicated section on our sustainable business operations [29] covers areas such as client satisfaction, human resources, compliance and data security, environmental management and our corporate citizenship activities.
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1 Data as at 31 December 2019
We offer a diversified range of active investment strategies across four main pillars: equities, fixed income, multi-asset and alternatives.
Our key markets are Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and the United States.
We have built extensive expertise covering developed and emerging markets, public and private markets.
Our investment advisory services from our specialist risklab offering help clients achieve their investment objectives.
Source: Allianz Global Investors
Our mission is to protect and enhance our clients’ wealth. Creating value goes beyond simply delivering investment returns. Our clients are our centre of gravity and we aim to generate value through long-term partnerships with them.
In our view, being an active asset manager offers unique advantages in today’s investment environment. We have developed a deep and distinctive expertise across five key dimensions of active asset management:
Sustainability – answering the growing call for sustainable solutions across asset classes by pooling our environmental, social and governance (ESG) expertise to capture opportunities linked to sustainable investing and increasingly across all our capabilities.
Active allocation and risk management – harnessing our risk-management and asset-allocation expertise to provide specialist solutions that meet a range of client requirements.
Thematic investing – drawing on our in-house research to identify investible themes that tap into clients’ evolving priorities and interests as well as exploiting trends.
Quant and factor investing – working across teams and asset classes seeking to harness long-term factor risk premia and structural market inefficiencies for alpha generation using new tools and techniques to support our decisions.
Private markets – building on our time-tested capabilities and growing market presence to provide clients with access to new sources of long-term income, making complexity investable.
Our ambition is to deliver value for all our stakeholders and therefore be seen as a leading global investor and trusted partner. To succeed, we aim to meet five principal business objectives.
All five objectives are interlinked: by serving our clients well and motivating our employees to excel, our company should grow sustainably and deliver strong results to our shareholder over the long term. These objectives are as follows:
Allianz Global Investors views asset management as a shared endeavour with its clients. This principle is encapsulated in our brand promise: “Value. Shared.”
We work with clients to elevate the active asset management experience. We are committed to unlocking the full potential of our sustainable investing proposition for clients by: