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A Letter of Introduction From The Portfolio Managers

 

We are pleased to introduce our new Impact Report which reflects our activity and progress throughout 2020.

The report reviews how we seek to use ESG research in our investment process, and how we seek companies with what we call Sustainable Business Advantage drivers (“SBA drivers”) and strong ESG risk management. It also discusses the environmental and social benefits that we believe are being created by our portfolio companies, looks at how we engage with our portfolio companies and reviews our involvement with the broader sustainable investing community.

The Global Leaders and Global Leaders Sustainable strategies were both classified as Article 8 under the new EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation that came into effect in March 2021. Despite all the disruption throughout 2020, it was pleasing to witness increasing adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations by investors around the world.

We are deeply committed to sustainable investing, with the goal first and foremost of seeking investments that can generate attractive investment returns, whilst aligning their investments with their values. We focus on sustainable investing because we believe that it represents good business sense that goes hand in hand with value creation.

Our investment philosophy starts with the most important person in any business: the customer. We want to invest in companies which can create attractive long-term value for their customers. We believe it is impossible for a company to deliver an enduring positive outcome unless also contributing to a healthy society and environment in which its customers, employees and ultimately its own business can thrive. As we see it, the longer an investor’s time horizon, the more ESG should matter to them.

We seek to embed sustainable thinking into our research—on “offense” through sustainable opportunity assessments that are embedded in the SBA business driver framework we adopted and on “defense” through ESG risk assessments. The ESG research team helped us formulate and codify our thinking about SBA drivers, and through these sustainable opportunity assessments we seek to identify SBA drivers with materiality and meaningful differentiation from peers that can drive excess economic value. ESG research is an essential part of our investment strategy. We believe it helps us make intelligent choices about investments, and guides our engagements with company management on important topics that may impact their long-term prospects.

If you are interested to learn more about how we incorporate SBA drivers, we recommend listening to our conversation with Unilever CEO, Alan Jope, recorded in November 2020 as part of our Navigating Our World podcast. The conversation highlighted how we believe SBA drivers match up with the values and purpose on display at Unilever.

We want to thank our ESG research team for helping develop these reports and informing our work in general. The team works tirelessly to help ensure that our investment decisions are informed by robust ESG information that may affect each company’s prospects. Most importantly, we are deeply grateful to our clients, who trust us as stewards of their capital and serve as our partners as we learn, innovate and improve over time.

We hope you find this year’s report informative, and we welcome a continuing conversation with you about the work we are doing.

 

Sincerely,

 

Mick Dillon, CFA
Portfolio Manager 
 

Bertie Thomson, CFA
Portfolio Manager
 

 

 

 

 

*Brown Advisory entities included are: Brown Advisory LLC, Brown Investment Advisory & Trust Company, Brown Advisory Ltd., and Brown Advisory Trust Company of Delaware, LLC.