High ownership acitivity in a turbulent year

Today, we have published our seventh report on responsible investment. The report is published during a challenging time for many companies.

"The coronavirus pandemic has stress-tested companies around the globe. As the world's largest shareholder, we have closely observed this. It has been important to maintain a close dialogue with the companies' boards and management throughout this turbulent year", says CEO in Norges Bank Investment Management Nicolai Tangen.

We have had a high level of activity in our active ownership work throughout the year. We have published five new position papers, three asset manager perspectives and more detailed voting guidelines. In addition, we have had meetings with 2,877 companies.

"During 2020, we have initiated several thematic dialogues related to our expectations. We have focused on climate risk for many years, and we have, among other things, initiated dialogue with 16 banks on how to manage climate risk in their lending and financing portfolios. We see that banks are increasingly working to quantify climate emissions from their financing operations", says Chief Governance and Compliance Officer Carine Smith Ihenacho.

Better sustainability reporting is a priority for the fund. In 2020, we carried out more than 4,000 detailed assessments of the companies' governance structure, strategy, risk management and performance metrics for sustainability.

"Throughout the year, we have seen that many companies maintain their focus on sustainability. Some have even come up with new initiatives. For example, we see a significant improvement in companies' climate reporting compared with 2019. The improvement is in all sectors", says Ihenacho.

In 2020, we also introduced systematic screening of the entire portfolio against our expectations and followed up individual companies. We voted on 121,619 proposals and started publishing explanations of all our votes against the board's recommendation.

Press contacts:
Marthe Skaar
Head of Media and External Relations
Phone: +47 926 17 663

Line Aaltvedt
Communications Manager
Phone: +47 948 54 656

E-mail: press@nbim.no