Sustainable Asset Management
Heritage
Who are Sustainable Asset Management (SAM)?
SAM Sustainable Asset Management was founded in Zurich in 1995 as an investment group exclusively focused on sustainability investing. Their offering includes asset management products, indexes and private equity.
As of December 31st 2008, SAM had €7.4bn assets under management and employed approximately 100 people worldwide. In 2006, SAM Group and Robeco, a member of the Rabobank Group, formed a strategic alliance to establish the world's leading platform for sustainability investments. Robeco were established in Rotterdam in 1929 and continue to offer investment solutions to institutional and private investors worldwide.
How are SAM and Robeco connected?
SAM and Robeco have formed a strategic alliance to create the world's leading platform for sustainability investments in terms of product development, innovation, and distribution.
Robeco is a member of the AAA rated Dutch Rabobank Group. Just in case you don't already know, AAA is the highest level of creditworthiness a bank can achieve and only five banks currently hold this rating in the World.
Investment Strategy
What is sustainability investing?
It's a long-term investment approach that integrates economic, environmental and social considerations when choosing where to invest.
What is corporate sustainability?
SAM aim to be a best-in-class provider, adopting a business approach that creates long-term shareholder value by seizing the opportunities and managing the risks that stem from sustainability trends and challenges.
What is SAM's investment strategy?
Their strategy's based on the principle that sustainability trends create opportunities and risks. These trends remain under-researched and allow SAM, with its proprietary methodology, to gain an information advantage over mainstream asset managers.
They focus on identifying, interpreting and quantifying the sustainability criteria relevant to shareholder value creation. 'Corporate Sustainability Assessment' enables them to measure a company's ability to embrace change by seizing opportunities and managing risks that macroeconomic and sustainability developments impose on each industry and so help identify the companies leading their peers.
Sustainability Core
For "Sustainability Core" strategies, SAM starts its stock selection with a global analysis of the most relevant sustainability trends and studies how economic, environmental and social challenges influence sectors, regions and corporations. These sustainability challenges are translated into actual assessment criteria, representing either a risk or an opportunity to the company, or a combination of the two. The assessment of companies results in sustainability scores. These scores are integrated into SAM's equity valuation model to determine the fair value of companies. This strategy aims to generate outperformance versus global or regional standard benchmarks by investing in the most sustainable and attractively priced companies.
Sustainability Themes
Based on global sustainability trends, SAM has identified "Sustainability Themes" such as Water, Energy, Resource Efficiency, Climate Change and Healthy Living. These investment themes are translated into thematic-oriented portfolios which often contain a high portion of small and midsized companies with attractive valuations. The focus lies on companies that develop and market innovative products and services accompanying the emergence of new sectors that are expected to experience above-average growth. As such, sustainability theme investing offers investors attractive return potential.
Research
SAM has conducted proprietary research around sustainable investment factors on over 1,100 companies every year since 1999, making them a global leader in sustainable investing research. They believe superior risk-adjusted returns since the inception of their funds also helps demonstrate the value and success of their approach.
People
SAM's research team consists of some 20 analysts from across the globe with a wide range of different but complementary backgrounds such as business, natural science, finance, and social science. Analysts have several years of relevant experience in sustainability-related areas and/or traditional financial analysis, ensuring they develop a detailed understanding of both sustainability risks and opportunities in each industry.