Having operated in Vietnam since 2003, VinaCapital has in-depth insights into the country and its business culture. We recognise its great potential for growth as well as the potential for value-added enhancement.
Managing environmental, social and governance issues is a key element of our overall investment risk management process and is important to generating long-term returns. Improving the ESG performance of companies in our portfolio is an essential value-creation activity for the investments we make. To help ensure compliance with these values, we have established a responsible investment framework.
Responsible Investment Policy
Our enhanced and comprehensive Responsible Investment Policy was approved by the Board of Directors in 2020.
ESG issues are overseen by our Group CEO and the Chairman of our Risk Management Committee. Our ESG and research teams have the experience, training, and tools needed to discover and assess environmental, social, and corporate governance risks and to develop solutions to address them. This helps ensure that our investment teams have the information necessary to make well-informed investment decisions.
We have established a culture in which ESG is embedded in the way we operate, how we expect our staff to behave, how we procure goods and services, and the partnerships we enter.
- We do not invest in companies involved in specific activities identified in our exclusion list, which was developed based on international best practices.
- We assign ESG ratings to companies in our investment pipeline to identify those with acceptable standards and practices.
- We integrate substantial ESG metrics into financial analysis and valuation models.
- We undertake further ESG Due Diligence for private equities and private fixed income investments.
- We identify opportunities for ESG improvement and associated costs and benefits.
- Our Investment Committees, Risk Management Committee each consider ESG risks in their assessment of opportunities.
- We prepare ESG action plans for private equity investments and ESG engagement plans for listed equity investments.
- We periodically review the ESG ratings for portfolio companies to identify any new risks and/or reflect improvements.
- We consult with the management of listed companies we invest in to improve company ESG practices.
- We engage with the management of PE investments to improve company ESG practices and create an incentive structure pre/post deal to reward ESG improvements.
- We consider exiting investments where there is ongoing evidence of major ESG violations and/or an ongoing failure to address identified ESG risks.
We are acutely aware of the challenges of investing in frontier markets like Vietnam, and the potential implications such challenges can have on the investments we make. For these reasons, we do not consider a poor ESG rating as a reason to not invest, provided that a company’s leadership understands that managing ESG risks is essential to long-term performance and sustainability and have a clear objective and sincere commitment to improving ESG practices. By investing in such companies, we aim to inspire and encourage management to create shareholder value by improving ESG practices.
Thematic Investment
Clean energy is a key area of focus for VinaCapital. We invest from our own balance sheet with an objective of being a developer of large-scale renewable and clean energy projects to help lead Vietnam’s transition away from coal-based generation.
We founded SkyX Solar, now a joint venture with EDF Renewables. The project has 60MW of rooftop solar power in operation throughout Vietnam, with a further pipeline of 100MW.
We established a renewable energy platform with EDF Renewables to develop a 500MW pipeline of onshore wind projects in Central Highlands Vietnam.
We successfully led a move to convert a previously approved coal-fired power plant project in Long An Province to a 3GW LNG power plant and are currently jointly developing it with GS Energy, a major South Korean energy conglomerate.
VinaCapital is the founding-member and key sponsor of the Institute for Circular Economy Development under the Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City.
VinaCapital recognizes the serious risks posed by climate change. We support and are an active signatory of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and Climate Action 100+ initiatives.
We collaborate with leading global organisations to bring ESG best practices to Vietnam.
We are a signatory to the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the world’s leading proponents of responsible investing. We are also a platinum member of the Vietnam Institute of Directors (VIOD), as part of our commitment to promoting international standards of governance to companies in Vietnam.
We have also established working relationships with leading international development agencies and other leading investment managers to share the common vision of enhancing ESG capacity in Vietnam.
We take social responsibility to our employees and the broader community in Vietnam seriously.
Our employees are our greatest assets, and we focus on fostering a supportive work culture through employee-friendly policies and benefits, regular training programmes, and structured, merit-based career progression. As a testament to this, VinaCapital was named the “Best Place to Work” in Vietnam’s financial services industry in 2020 and ranked among the “100 Best Places to Work” in Vietnam in 2021.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Founded in 2006 as a USA-registered 501-c3 public charitable organization, The VinaCapital Foundation (VCF) is one of the first foreign philanthropic organizations registered in Vietnam and remains one of the largest and most effective.
VinaCapital is VCF’s first funding partner covering VCF’s overhead costs so that one hundred percent of all donations to VCF are dedicated to supporting the VCF’s program beneficiaries. VCF’s mission is to create healthcare and education solutions to transform the lives of underserved and marginalized children and women in Vietnam. VCF focuses on activities in 3 key areas: Grassroots medical programs, Healthcare capacity building programs, and Education programs. VCF’s vision is a thriving Vietnam where all children and women are healthy, educated and empowered to benefit from economic growth and contribute to sustainable improvements in their communities. Across every program runs deep commitments to children’s and women’s rights, gender equality, improved nutrition, environmental protection, and poverty reduction. The work of VCF touches the lives of millions of Vietnamese in 63 provinces every year.