Our Portfolio
Sustainable and Responsible Investing (SRI)
Sustainable and Responsible Investing (SRI) has come a long way over the past few decades, building upon its initial practice of screening out undesirable investments to today’s practices of integrating environmental, social and governance considerations into an overall assessment of not only risk, but opportunities. Sustainable and Responsible Investing not only avoids investments which negatively impact the environment and society, but also actively allocates capital to those companies that are most advanced in using resources efficiently and creating a more sustainable economy. In addition, RS Group’s investment managers also actively engage with their investees on these matters. Capital allocation and active ownership are both important aspects of mobilizing all assets for positive, blended value creation. Our SRI fund managers include:
Impact Investing (II)
RS Group views impact investing as a strategic lens through which our capital, regardless of the asset class they are in, are actively invested in opportunities and projects which can advance sustainability and generate impact in our world. We invest in projects and mission-driven companies in which positive social and environmental value creation is fundamental to their business models. Over time we hope through working with our investment partners to advance more sustainable corporate and community practices in our world.
A selection of our impact investing fund managers and partners include:
We also look for innovative ways our capital can be used to generate impact. An example of this is in our support of Hong Kong’s affordable housing social enterprise LightBe. In 2013 we entered into real estate investments and deployed them to help pilot LightBe’s first “Light Home”, contributing to the success of this model in HK with over 200 units currently under LightBe’s management.
Catalytic Capital
Over the last few years, through our partners and own observations, we see an increasing need for a more risk-taking capital to address the risks and concerns of more mainstream investors, including: a lack of track record of founders/fund managers; lack of data or evidence base; frontier market risk; and/or organisation has a highly innovative but not yet fully proven product or service. Due to these concerns, investors hold back from providing crucially needed capital to these organisations and/or funds which are usually in countries most in touch with the natural ecosystems and local communities where support is most needed.
Catalytic capital is “impact first” funding which takes on a disproportionate amount of risk and accepts a lower financial return compared to more conventional investors. This is to attract more capital into deals aiming to achieve deeper outcomes. Using a variety of instruments, catalytic capital is flexible, willing to take lead going into new areas, and deployed with the mindset of helping to advance the impact investing field. Catalytic capital is also needed to support organisations looking to move beyond grant funding, but still require patient, flexible and high risk tolerant capital; for ventures, to enable them to prove out their business model, or in the case of a first-time fund managers, prove they can invest and achieve target financial and impact returns for its investors.
A venture builder for nature-based solutions to provide seed funding and hands-on support to entrepreneurs in SE Asia until they reach a stage of attracting institutional capital
Philanthropy
As an asset owner, we believe the world needs as much philanthropic capital as possible to help achieve the global climate and social goals since it is the capital in the spectrum which can take on the most risk. It is also a “gateway” capital allocation for those who are interested but not yet ready to move into impact investing.
It is the capital in our portfolio which supports organisations and initiatives that have the potential to create deep systemic changes in our society and potentially catalyse further funding into such organisations. We focus especially on pilot and proof of concept initiatives and at the same time, deploy our philanthropic capital with the mindset of building the sector and field. We believe field building is crucial in order to enable others to learn and find opportunities to collaborate.
Incubation
Whilst we always seek to prioritize supporting existing actors (with investments and grants, etc.) there are times where we see significant gaps in the ecosystem not filled by anyone, and therefore there is a need to incubate the organizations or platforms needed to fill the gap.
Our incubated projects are:
