BB Adamant Sustainable
Healthcare Fund

Bellevue Asset Management AG brought the world’s first sustainability-themed healthcare investment fund to the market with the launch of the BB Adamant Sustainable Healthcare Fund in the summer of 2018. The strategy, which has earned the Austrian Ecolabel UZ 49, delivered another extremely pleasing return in the 2020 calendar year. Its year-on-year investment performance of 29.2% in USD, its base currency, compares to a gain of 13.5% for the MSCI World Healthcare Index over the same period. The fund's significant excess performance versus the broader market is attributed to its investments in three Danish healthcare companies and to its exposure to Asian healthcare stocks.

Its explicitly sustainable investment approach has won over a growing number of private and institutional investors. These include funds of funds and relationship managers and, increasingly, wealth management banks, all of which are using the fund to address the issue of sustainability in their investment strategies. In 2020 the fund attracted more than CHF 90 mn in net new money, increasing the size of the fund substantially to CHF 172 mn as of the end of the year.

«The fund’s carbon footprint is only 32 tonnes of carbon emissions per million dollars, which is less than the carbon intensity of the healthcare universe as a whole»

Distribution of MSCI ESG fund rating universe

Colored bars correspond to portfolio and benchmark ESG quality scores

The MSCI ESG rating for the fund as at year-end is AA, whereas the average rating for the approximately 1100 stocks in the global healthcare universe is a low BBB. More than 40% of the stocks in the funds’ portfolio also have a positive rating trend, whereas only 18% of the stocks in the global healthcare universe have a positive rating trend. The fund's carbon footprint is only 32 tonnes of carbon emissions per million dollars of portfolio sales, which is less than the carbon intensity of the global healthcare universe as a whole (37 tonnes) and only one-fifth that of the MSCI global equity index (151 tonnes).

Although the fund was not explicitly launched as an impact-investing strategy, attention is drawn to the fund’s positive contribution towards achieving the targets given in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

According to the MSCI ESG’s sustainable impact model, the net positive impact of the BB Adamant Sustainable Healthcare Fund is 27%, compared to a mere 5% for the MSCI world equity index and 7% for the global world healthcare universe. This high score can be traced to the positive social impact inherent in healthcare-related fields, rather than to environment-related aspects. According to the MSCI's sustainable impact classification scale, a score of more than 20% is considered «very high».

Although the primary objective of the BB Adamant Sustainable Healthcare Fund is to achieve an attractive investment performance by investing in listed companies active in the healthcare sector while meeting the strict sustainability criteria of the Austrian Ecolabel UZ49, the MSCI ESG assessment indicates that the fund's active investment approach also has a clearly net positive impact with respect to the UN SDGs. Nevertheless, Bellevue views its fund as an investment strategy focused on sustainability and not as an explicitly impact-driven strategy.

Impact Exposure Classification