In our Annual Sustainability Report for 2020, SKAGEN CEO Tim Warrington explores to what extent human incursions have made a permanent mark on the world. These have resulted in the current climate emergency, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the effects of pollution and even the present global pandemic, to name but a few. Many of the treatments to these ills exist, at a technical level; what remains is the will to develop and use them.

SKAGEN's purpose remains to help secure our clients’ financial security, and in a way that leaves the world a better place. We aim to do this through the delivery of superior investment returns and advice, while actively engaging with the companies that we own in line with our declared sustainability policy. 

Active ownership

Engaging with companies is a key part of an active investment manager’s responsibility and ESG topics regularly feature on the agenda. The volume of our engagement activities increased in absolute terms in 2020 and one important engagement was with Samsung Electronics. We believe that the key reason for the positive outcome was not investor pressure, but rather investor collaboration and trust. As active and long-term shareholders, we believe it is our responsibility to partner with the companies we invest in and not to selectively associate in good times and disassociate in bad times.

ESG in the funds

SKAGEN's portfolio managers have made a firm commitment to actively engage with the companies they own in line with our sustainability policy. In this report, they explain how they work with ESG in their respective funds, illustrated through select company cases.

Corporate sustainability

2020 was the year when we made good on our decision to improve and accelerate our corporate sustainability efforts. Becoming a signatory of the UN’s Global Compact principles was an important milestone, whereby we committed to strategically work on potential problematic areas, and also to communicate and report on our progress. Corporate sustainability – in other words all our in-house sustainability efforts – is now a fixed feature of our quarterly and annual sustainability reports, and more visible on our webpages. We continue to work on our three highlighted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely SDG 5: Gender Equality, SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 13: Climate Action.

You can read more about this and more in our Sustainability Report for 2020.

We hope you enjoy the report!