Active Ownership
31
Voting
Voting is an effective tool to influence companies and to support and escalate our engagements. We believe that sound corporate governance contributes to long-term shareholder value and thus supports sustainable development.
Our Corporate Governance Principles summarises our view on a range of governance issues such as board composition, remuneration and sustainability. The Corporate Governance team spearhead our voting efforts. The team analyses investee companies’ shareholder meeting agenda items and resolutions, and organises ongoing dia- logue with investee companies before and after these meet- ings with the aim to: • Be a responsible investor and strategic partner to our investee companies • Encourage best practise in line with our corporate gover- nance principles • Raise awareness among board members around sustain- ability topics, particularly climate commitments The Corporate Governance team cooperates closely with NAM’s RI team, which leads NAM’s work on responsible investment alongside the portfolio managers. The teams maintain an ongoing ESG dialogue with companies to get a better understanding and push for continued improvements.
Besides good governance, we place particular emphasis on our other active ownership focus areas: climate, human rights and biodiversity. We see more and more shareholder propos- als relating to environmental issues and climate reporting, and support for these type of resolutions is increasing. We welcome the fact that interest in these issues is growing each year and that increasing numbers of investors are supporting shareholder proposals around these questions. In 2023 we voted at about 3,700 General Meetings on thou- sands of proposals, including issues such as climate, data pri- vacy, diversity, as well as remuneration programs and capital structure. The outcome in 2023 is well above our target of 90% of possible voting. Increasingly, we are being invited by companies in the Nordics to join their nomination committees. Membership of nomina- tion committees is a very efficient way to engage with the companies we have large holdings in, and it enables us to drive real change – for instance on the Board gender ratio. During 2023 we were represented in 39 nomination commit- tees in three countries, in line with previous years. We also strive to introduce ownership-led nomination committees in other countries, and we have been successful several times in doing so.
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