Engagement with portfolio companies

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Engagement with portfolio companies

Nordic Capital actively engages with its portfolio companies to promote sustainability

Nordic Capital actively engages with its portfolio companies during the ownership stage to promote the importance of sustainability, drive sustainable performance and share best practice. It sets out clear expectations for portfolio companies, ensuring that sustainability is addressed appropriately at boardroom level and throughout the organisation.

Nordic Capital’s Sustainability Team provides portfolio companies with ongoing support to help them strengthen their sustainability agendas and develop appropriate processes in order to mitigate key sustainability risks and realise potential opportunities.

KEY AREAS OF SUPPORT

Training

Nordic Capital believes that training and the sharing of best practice within Nordic Capital and its portfolio companies is critical and has an established training programme on how to address sustainability factors in a business and drive a sustainability agenda.

Tools

We provide practical tools to help portfolio companies strengthen their sustainability strategies and develop appropriate processes for assessment, compliance, and reporting.

Monitoring and Coaching

We have a developed sustainability software platform for non-financial data collection. Based on collected sustainability data and subsequent analysis we engage with our portfolio companies to realise value creation potential and meet increasing regulatory requirements.

Networking

We host an annual Sustainability Summit and bespoke roundtable events throughout the year for portfolio companies. We support and engage with relevant organisations and forums, where policy makers, businesses and academic professionals meet to discuss societal impact.

Environmental, social, and corporate governance

We are committed to investing responsibly and our ambition is to develop companies into successful and sustainable businesses. We seek to do this in a responsible way, with a clear understanding of the environmental and social impacts. We encourage our portfolio companies to consider UNGC’s 10 principles when developing their own sustainability strategies.

Nordic Capital also measure the contribution of active ownership and driving sustainable progress in the portfolio prioritised and aligned with six of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We have identified the most material to Nordic Capital and our portfolio companies and aligned strategy and reporting to underlying targets and measures. We actively encourage portfolio companies to, at minimum, meet external standards for sustainability.

KEY FOCUS AREAS INCLUDE

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Climate action

We aim to assess and measure climate related risks and environmental impact during our ownership. Measuring enables proper action to reduce negative climate impact.

Responsible energy use

Portfolio companies are encouraged to reduce their environmental footprint. Energy efficiency, energy from sustainable sources and lowering greenhouse gas emissions is a prerequisite for a sustainable future.

Sustainable sourcing

We expect our portfolio companies to support a precautionary approach and encourage them to ensure resource efficient practices, responsible waste handling and to choose sustainable materials when sourcing.

SOCIAL IMPACT

Diversity & Equality

Diversity and equality are key contributors to business performance. It also increases organisational performance and enhances the ability to attract and retain talents. We strive to ensure women's full and effective participation and equal opportunity for leadership at all levels of decision-making.

Human rights

Our clear expectation is that international conventions, human rights, and employee rights and conditions should be followed and respected.

Employee engagement

We encourage our companies to drive strategic HR initiatives that will increase engagement among employees since it is highly linked to business performance.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Compliance

We ensure that our companies have sufficient processes and protections in place in major areas of compliance such as anti-corruption, anti-trust, trade sanctions, as well as information security and data protection.

Ethics

We encourage our portfolio companies to place an emphasis on being a trustworthy and responsible business, to define transparent codes, clear guidelines and frameworks in this area and to place sustainability requirements on their suppliers.

Whistleblowing

We encourage our portfolio companies to ensure that well established whistleblowing systems are in place to monitor incidences of unacceptable behaviour and to encourage a culture of transparency.

Sustainability in action

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