Nomura Asset Management Malaysia has begun trading of its Global Shariah Sustainable Equity Fund on the 13th June 2022 after its 21-day initial offer period. It is the newest Shariah compliant SRI fund in Malaysia according to the Securities Commission Malaysia. Leslie Yap, the country head and managing director for Malaysia at Tokyo-headquartered Nomura Asset Management, shares the details of the fund with ISFI.
The Islamic fund follows its conventional fund counterpart launched in August 2017 and offered in Malaysia in June 2021. It seeks to combine Shariah compliant investing in the fund’s selection of strong global companies with quality bias and with a clear positive impact on the environment and society.
The unit trust follows the global sustainable equity strategy which seeks to identify a group of companies that can sustainably deliver significant value to society, while also responsibly allowing shareholders and other stakeholders to benefit from that value creation.
“We recognized this as a ‘total stakeholder approach’ and we hold on to our belief that as public equity investors, we can have a huge impact through engagement with these public listed companies in solving many of the problems society faces,” Yap shared.
The fund, benchmarked to the Dow Jones Islamic Market Developed Markets Index with a global investment universe, seeks to deliver a ‘double bottom line’ of high returns and high positive sustainability impact. It identifies six impact goals: mitigating climate change, mitigating natural capital depletion, eliminating communicable diseases, mitigating the obesity epidemic, ensuring global access to basic financial services and ensuring global access to clean drinking water.
“The Global Sustainable Equity strategy identifies six impact goals that are aligned with the UN SDGs. Subsequently, the global equity team uses a key performance indicator approach to identify public company investments that support these goals. These companies will be further assigned measurable ‘company performance indicators’; the team regularly tracks and engages with the investee companies to enhance impact creation by these companies,” Yap commented.
