AP4 won three awards at the award ceremony at the IPE Conference & Awards in Vienna on 28 November: Portfolio Construction & Diversification, Public Pension Fund and Long-Term Investment Strategy.
The Sustainable Investment Awards 2023 named AP4 "Sovereign wealth fund of the year 2023". The award is presented by The Environmental Finance Sustainable Company Awards, which each year recognizes companies in all sectors that are both leading and driving in the work towards a sustainable future.
AP4 has built up a team for fundamental company selection in resource-intensive sectors. The team's work is to identify companies in the sectors that are partly exposed to long-term trends but which are also leaders from a sustainability perspective in each sector.
2022 was a challenging year in the financial markets. In addition to large and rapid changes in real interest rates, pricing in the energy markets was extremely volatile following the outbreak of war in Ukraine – a war in which, on top of all the human suffering, has also radically changed the game rules for the world’s energy supply.
The Council on Ethics of the Swedish AP Funds (AP1, AP2, AP3 and AP4) have organised a group of institutional investors with EUR 6.4 trillion in combined assets under management to collaboratively engage tech giants with the aim to strengthen their management of human rights risks and impacts.
Jenny Gustafsson has been appointed as the new Head of the AP Funds’ Council on Ethics. Jenny joins the Council from AMF and will lead the work of further strengthening the Council and contributing both to value creation in the income pension system and to more sustainable societies. The recruitment is part of the development of the Council.
The AP Funds’ Council on Ethics had a highly active 2022, with more than 3,200 companies being screened for possible violations and incidents. One project that was successfully closed in 2022 centred on child labour in the cocoa sector. A further 16 new dialogues were initiated. In eight proactive projects the focus is on human rights, the climate and corporate governance and 86 reactive company dialogues are ongoing, aimed at addressing and preventing serious accidents and incidents linked to lack of sustainability.