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Industriens Pension (industriens) is the result of a collaboration between Danish employers and trade unions. The labour market pension scheme was founded in 1992, with the Confederation of Danish Industries owning 35% of the share capital and the Central Organisation of Industrial Employees in Denmark owning the remaining 65%. Industriens operates as a closed system with all profits reinvested for the benefit of its 442,000 members, who are mostly blue-collar workers from more than 8,000 Danish companies.
Industriens’s €31.5 billion asset under management are outsourced to external managers apart from Danish and international government and mortgage bonds and Danish equities, which are handled internally. As of 29 October 2024, Industriens’ external managers were the following: Pimco, Guggenheim Partners, Nomura Asset Management, Seix Investment Advisors, PGIM, GoldenTree Asset management, Ninety One, MetLife Investment Management, Lazard Asset Management, Aristotle Capital Management, State Street Global Advisors, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, BlackRock, Epoch Investment Partners, BankInvest Asset Management, and Nykredit Asset Management.
Industriens allocates to investment grade, high yield, and emerging market bonds as well as private credit. There are allocations for domestic and global equities, as well as private equity. The alternatives portfolio also includes real estate and infrastructure. Industriens also operates inflation, interest rate, and currency overlays among other strategies.
The fund’s responsible investment policy imposes restrictions to the investment universe at both sovereign and corporate levels. The publicly available exclusions lists are mainly based on EU sanctions, country’s ESG performance, and companies’ involvement in coal mining, controversial fossil fuel extraction, weaponry, or human rights violations.
The basic negative screening is complemented by Industriens’ active promotion of the green transition, climate and environmental themes, and workers’ and human rights. Industriens seeks to engage with companies, only excluding those for which stewardship efforts have failed. It also aims to positively influence the low-carbon transition by investing in clean technologies and renewable energy companies and infrastructure.
The latter asset class is included within Industriens’ active value-add allocation alongside listed equity, property, and private equity. Industriens has sufficient scale to invest directly in offshore windfarms, biogas plants, and solar energy farms. It also invests in funds and co-investments with external managers where appropriate. Head of Real Assets Jan Østergaard provided a detailed insight into Industriens’ strategy for this asset class in an interview with Infrastructure Investor magazine.
