Divesting from companies
Risk-based divestments are where we sell our holdings in a company or decide not to invest in the first place even though the company is in the fund’s benchmark index.
What is a risk-based divestment?
We monitor sustainability risks across all companies in the equity portfolio and equity benchmark index. We may divest from a company if we assess that its long-term market valuation may be adversely affected by its mismanagement of social and environmental issues.
Risk-based divestments are investment decisions. When we divest from a company, we sell our holdings and stop making new investments. They are active decisions within our tracking error limits that affect relative return. The risk and return implications for the fund are a central part of the assessment. If a divested company improves, we may reverse the divestment decision.
We may decide to divest from a company if:
- It does not have credible plans for reducing its governance and sustainability risks
- The size of the investment is relatively small
- Other tools, such as dialogue and voting, are unlikely to be a success
Divestment is a last resort
Risk-based divestments may also be made as part of our role as a long-term owner and are a last resort in our work on active ownership. Divesting from a company will not necessarily affect how it addresses governance and sustainability risks, so we always try first to steer it in a sustainable and profitable direction through active ownership – dialogue and voting. If this work does not make any progress, we may then decide to divest.
We divested from 58 companies in 2025. Of these, 17 were companies that entered the fund's benchmark index entered the fund's benchmark index during the year. Altogether, we have made 633 divestment decisions since 2012. We do not publish information on which companies we divest from, but we are open about the criteria for these decisions and about the types of sustainability risk that have led to divestments.
In 2025, we reversed 14 risk-based divestments. Alltogether, we have reversed 39 risk-based divestments since 2012.
58
Risk-based divestments in 2025
Impact on the fund’s equity returns
We measure the impact of our investment decisions, including risk based divestments, on our returns. The impact on the equity portfolio from the risk-based divestments was -0.04 percentage point in 2025.
Since 2012, risk-based divestments have increased the cumulative return on equity management by 0.68 percentage point, or 0.01 percentage point annually, equating to 12 billion kroner. Risk-based divestments linked to climate change and human rights have increased the cumulative return on equity management by 0.36 and 0.15 percentage point respectively.
Insights into our company investments
Historical information on all of the fund's investments can be found in our holdings list. You can search by country, asset class and sector. The information is updated twice a year and is available since our first investment in 1998.