PIMCO
Asset manager
Profile
Who we are
PIMCO is a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. We invest our clients’ capital across a range of fixed income and credit opportunities, leveraging our decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Our flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped us become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and nontraditional solutions for companies that need financing and investors who seek strong risk-adjusted returns.
Investment Leadership Our portfolio management team is headed by our CIOs, but investment decision-making is a team effort, drawing upon the skills and insights of portfolio managers and analysts around the globe.
PIMCO’s position in the Netherlands
The Dutch market is an important market for PIMCO, as we have been managing assets for Dutch pension funds, insurance companies, family offices and banks for over 35 years. Clients in the Netherlands have entrusted PIMCO with assets of around €10 billion, which is invested in a broad range of investment strategies including global and core bond strategies, credit, emerging market debt, private debt and LDI. Our Dutch client base is supported by four dedicated account managers, who are well known with the local client developments and challenges, including reporting, regulation (amongst which FTK, Wet Toekomst Pensioen), LDI and ESG investing.
For strategic questions about risk management, portfolio optimization, scenario analysis, LDI etc, the team works closely with the PIMCO Solutions and Analytics team based in EMEA. PIMCO is therefore able to support clients in both asset management and strategic advice, which is part of our broader client servicing.
The Netherlands is part of the broader Benelux Team, headed by Patrick Dunnewolt. Jeroen van van Bezooijen and Vincent Groenewoud are dedicated account managers in the Institutional team, while Phil Michels is responsible for our Wealth Management Business in the Netherlands.
ESG developments
PIMCO has managed socially responsible investments since 1989 and has built out a dedicated sustainability mutual fund platform. In addition, PIMCO has built our ESG research capabilities over the past 10+ years with proprietary scoring frameworks built across major fixed income asset classes. PIMCO generally incorporates the consideration of ESG factors into our broad investment research process when evaluating the long-term ESG risks and opportunities of issuers, where applicable. In 2021, PIMCO scored strongly amongst signatory peers and received five-star scores across four of five relevant PRI modules, reflecting the strength of our firm-wide ESG integration.
Recent ESG Improvements and Initiatives
At PIMCO, we are focused on evolving and enhancing our sustainability processes and capabilities. PIMCO’s ESG Leadership team provides strategic guidance for further developing the firm’s sustainability thinking and capabilities. The group sets objectives and evaluates initiatives and priorities on a continuous basis throughout the year. Similar to the long-term orientation of PIMCO’s investment process, the firm’s ESG Leadership team establishes long-term strategic objectives. Please see below for key recent sustainability milestones:
· Expanded climate risk framework – PIMCO has dedicated resources to build out proprietary, portfolio-level climate scenario analysis tools, and has also expanded climate risk coverage beyond corporates and sovereigns to include capabilities in the US municipals space. PIMCO leverages comprehensive climate risk data provider risQ to help provide actionable insights geared toward better assessing physical risks’ effects on public debt.
· Thematic ESG engagements – PIMCO’s ESG analyst team has pursued targeted, thematic engagement efforts across a range of issuers focused on topics such as the adverse climate effects of methane emissions, portfolio emissions and Paris Agreement alignment in the financials industry, deforestation, nutrition, and modern slavery and human rights throughout business models and supply chains.
· Defined sustainability considerations in Alternative Investments – We formalized our approach to the consideration of ESG factors where relevant in private market transactions, and established an ESG Alts Advisory Group.
Recent ESG Process Changes
As a firm, we continue to enhance proprietary tools to assess, manage, and help mitigate ESG related risks in our portfolios, and to harness potential opportunities in the evolving market landscape. This framework helps us, among other things, to decrease portfolio exposure to financial risks brought about by climate change and reduce the overall exposure to activities contributing to global warming. To aid this process, PIMCO continues to invest in our sustainability Platform by hiring global teammates to help supplement our broad work streams. PIMCO’s sustainability team now spans 50+ investment professionals specifically responsible for building the sustainability platform.
While we have not had significant changes in PIMCO’s time-tested investment process in the past 12-36 months, we are constantly evolving and improving our ESG processes and capabilities, through building proprietary scoring systems, improving our ESG research coverage across asset classes and hiring industry experts. Over the last 12-36 months, we have designed and implemented enhanced ESG evaluation capabilities, including robust proprietary tools to assess, manage, and help mitigate climate-related risks in our clients’ portfolios. For example, PIMCO has developed a climate risk scoring methodology that evaluates sectors’ exposure to climate risk over cyclical, secular and super-secular time horizons. We have also built climate scenario and stress-test models, to predict and estimate the impact of different transition scenarios on various financial indicators. We also formalised our approach to ESG integration in the alternative investments space, and launched ESG strategies across the flexible, diversified credit and emerging market asset classes.
On the engagement front: at a firm level PIMCO continues to expand our intensive ESG engagement initiatives with issuers around the world, spanning corporations, sovereigns, municipalities and others. We believe strongly that an active engagement platform can deliver change and deliver value for our investors. In 2022, PIMCO’s global team of 80+ credit research analysts engaged with 1,370 corporate bond issuers across industries and regions on sustainability topics. PIMCO’s credit and ESG research analysts engage with the companies that they cover, discussing topics with company management teams related to corporate strategy, leverage, and balance sheet management, as well as sustainability-related topics such as climate change targets and environmental plans, human capital management, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and board qualifications and composition. We have also progressed our engagement efforts across different asset classes including sovereigns, and municipals: PIMCO’s municipals credit research team has been dedicated to expanding their municipal issuer engagement efforts and also plays an active role with the Milken Public Finance Advisory Committee and PRI Sub-Sovereign Debt Advisory Committee. In sum, PIMCO continues to build on our engagement efforts, aiming to reach more issuers and have more meaningful engagements using our improved technology and engagement framework. Finally on engagement, PIMCO’s ESG Technology team has developed proprietary tools to help ESG analysts track issuer engagements on sustainability issues. Our proprietary systems seeks to capture the latest information on issuers’ forward-looking strategy to manage sustainability and positive impact factors. These tools also provide aggregated reporting on ESG engagement priorities. Working with the credit research team, the ESG analyst team uses these tools to track the progress of our engagement efforts (e.g., industry-specific questionnaires, company calls and in-person meetings) based on sustainability themes, including progress milestones and follow-ups.
Locaties
PIMCO Europe Ltd (London)
PIMCO Europe GmbH (Germany)
Contacts
Research & content
Asset Management
Find out how we’re positioning portfolios across global asset classes for the year ahead, with Geraldine Sundstrom, portfolio manager and head of asset allocation.
Asset Category
As banks pull back from many types of lending, demand for capital is outpacing supply, providing the best potential opportunities in private credit since the GFC.
Market & Macro
In our 2024 outlook, bonds emerge as a standout asset class, offering strong prospects, resilience, diversification, and attractive valuations compared with equities.
Asset Management
Hear from PIMCO experts about how investors may benefit from capturing today’s compelling yields among high-quality bonds, including investment grade credit. Explore the potential for equity-like returns with lower volatility.
Market & Macro
Our September Cyclical Forum was the first to be held in London, where the economic situation today reflects what’s happening around the world.The Bank of England (BOE) is nearing the end of a long journey to raise interest rates. This tightening of monetary policy has fueled increased volatility in U.K. financial markets, and there are concerns that the British economy could soon stall or slip into a recession.
Similar scenarios are playing out globally as countries continue their efforts to quell the post-pandemic inflationary spike. Central banks are reaching the end of their tightening cycles on different schedules and with different peak policy rates in sight.
Asset Management
The spike in bond yields presents an opportunity for fixed income investors to earn capital gains and diversify portfolios.
Market & Macro
“Restrictive for longer” is now the mantra as monetary policymakers seek to bring inflation reliably to target.
Asset Management
Looking at credit markets today, we see a tremendous opportunity for investors to potentially achieve near-equity-like returns in high quality corporate bonds, which tend to have much lower volatility than stocks. Starting yield levels – historically strongly correlated with returns – are the highest they’ve been in more than a decade.
Market & Macro
Critical macroeconomic trends, including a shift in globalization and the continued rise of nationalism, may contribute to relatively low global growth over the secular horizon of the next five years.
Market & Macro
Group CIO Dan Ivascyn reflects on his recent career milestone celebrating 25 years at PIMCO – a period of great change and growth in the markets.
Market & Macro
Sustainable investing has gone through several evolutionary stages. What began as a largely equities-oriented negative screening approach for socially responsible investors, has diffused into a global, multi-asset class investing movement. In recognition of this transformation, we have changed the title of this year’s annual report from Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) to Sustainable Investing, highlighting the significance of this deemed global megatrend.
Market & Macro
Our outlook for commercial real estate investing argues for a flexible, long-term approach to seize opportunities in debt and equity investments across the real estate landscape.
Market & Macro
The first few years of the 2020s have seen a number of acute economic, financial, and geopolitical disruptions on a worldwide scale, and it will take time for the ultimate consequences of these shocks to be fully felt. At PIMCO’s latest Secular Forum, we discussed how recent short-term cyclical dynamics are likely to have longer-lasting secular consequences.
Market & Macro
Debt-financed fiscal policy is driving much of today’s high inflation, but as pandemic-era measures fade, central banks will likely return to their key role in managing price levels.
Asset Management
Engagement is an essential tool for sustainable investing, as it can enhance investment insight and help influence positive change.
Market & Macro
High-quality fixed income assets may offer the best return potential in more than a decade along with diversification benefits as a likely recession approaches.Clients
Investment Beliefs
How we invest
PIMCO manages assets entrusted to us by central banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, corporations, foundations and endowments, and individual investors around the world. Our scale and specialized resources have helped build a diverse platform of product offerings.
PIMCO’s active investment process, 50 years in the making, combines our top-down macroeconomic view with bottom-up research and analysis to put our best ideas around the world to work in PIMCO portfolios. This approach has enabled us to give our clients an edge by anticipating economic and market developments and forecasting major inflection points – insights that may be especially valuable in today’s uncertain market environment.
Values and Objectives
Our beliefs
PIMCO believes that performance starts with preparation. Using exhaustive research and analysis, we continuously evaluate the world’s changing risks and opportunities, with the aim of building forward-looking solutions to meet our clients’ evolving needs. We are invested in our clients’ success, going beyond investment performance to share insights and invest in tools and resources to help them achieve their goals.
Full force of PIMCO behind you
PIMCO believes there is nothing more important than the partnership we have with our clients. Every portfolio we manage benefits from the skills and expertise of our people, including more than 965 investment professionals around the globe, with backgrounds from finance to government to physics.
Embracing diverse perspectives
PIMCO has long believed that encouraging different points of view is critical to long-term success. One way we do this is by inviting outside experts to share their insights and help us test our thinking. These experts include the members of our Global Advisory Board, as well as outside advisors and forum speakers – distinguished individuals who have included Nobel laureates, central bank policymakers and dozens of experts from the worlds of business, academia and other domains.
Disclaimer
Not all PIMCO funds and strategies actively promote environmental and social characteristics or pursue an ESG-based investment strategy or limit its investments to those that meet specific ESG criteria or standards. Instead, PIMCO’s portfolio managers and analyst teams will evaluate and weigh a variety of factors, which can include ESG considerations (where financially material), to make investment decisions.
This webpage contains the current opinions of the manager and such opinions are subject to change without notice. This webpage has been distributed for informational purposes only and should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but not guaranteed. No part of this webpage may be reproduced in any form, or referred to in any other publication, without express written permission. PIMCO is a trademark or registered trademark of Allianz Asset Management of America LLC in the United States and throughout the world. ©2023, PIMCO