Invesco flags cybersecurity as key investment theme
After a string of high-profile cyberattacks on major Australian corporates, this investment manager sees a key theme for equities in 2023.
In its 2023 Investment Outlook, US-based money manager Invesco noted that cybersecurity is one of two equity themes it will be keeping an eye on over the coming year (the other being healthcare).
In its Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022, Invesco said the World Economic Forum had warned that as digitalisation continued to proliferate and new technologies were introduced, cyber risk would inevitably grow.
“In other words, the more the Internet is utilised in business and in life, the more we need to be worried about cybersecurity,” the Invesco outlook noted.
“In addition, we expect corporations’ cybersecurity efforts to matter more to customers and investors in the future. Many regulators (most notably the US Securities and Exchange Commission) require that businesses disclose risk factors in their filings to the public in the interest of transparency for investors.”
Technology consultancy Gartner Group believed organisations would start to mandate and use cybersecurity risk as a significant determinant when conducting business with all third parties, across the digital ecosystem.
Invesco believed those companies that did more and spent more to mitigate cybersecurity risk were likely to be rewarded by customers and investors.
Jeff Spiegel, US head of BlackRock Megatrend, International and Sector ETFs, said that as more systems moved to the cloud and relied on global networks, the need to ensure data security and privacy would continue to increase.
He believed cybersecurity stocks would continue to outperform the broader tech sector.
“Cybersecurity has moved from niche to necessity,” he told Yahoo in December. “It's not something that can be cut anymore during a downturn.”
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