Targeting future sustainable tech gets gold
What sets the Responsible Investments winner, Nanuk New World fund, apart from the rest is that it is the only global fund that invests specifically in industries and technologies that contribute to improving global environmental sustainability.
Nanuk chief investment officer, Tom King, said he was happy the fund was getting recognition as the fund invested in parts of the economy that would continue to grow over the long term and which had interesting nuances and complexities that lent themselves to active management.
“The prominent ones are renewable energy technologies like solar and wind. More recently in battery energy storage and things to do with smart grid. In the transport space, you’re talking about a paradigm shift towards electric vehicles which is an area of focus for us,” he said.
“Then you’ve got areas of traditional environmental investment like waste management, recycling, sustainable materials and we invest in technology areas like advance manufacturing, industrial automation and robotics.”
King noted that the fund had outperformed global equity benchmarks during the beginning of the year when markets fells due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said the biggest challenge as investment managers right now was dealing with expectations of growth that was not certain.
“That was a challenges for us in the second half of last year when a number of cyclical parts of the investment markets performed very strongly on expectations of growth this year that clearly hasn’t happened,” he said.
“Similarly, in recent months the staggering recovery has seen large parts of the market perform in a way that challenges our assessment on how strong economic growth is going to be in those areas.”
However, over the long term, King said his outlook was optimistic in relation to the areas the fund was focused on as they were likely to benefit very significantly from economic stimulus that had been disproportionately directed towards sustainable infrastructure and sustainable technology.
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