Future Returns: Millennials and Sustainable Investing
Millenials are more eager than any group to invest funds sustainably according to their value.
4 min
They’re about to inherit a US$30 trillion wealth transfer, and more eager than any group to invest funds sustainably according to their values. But millennials are still the biggest believers that doing so means facing a financial tradeoff, says a new report.
Last month, Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing published its fourth Sustainable Signals white paper, which surveyed 800 American individual investors 18 and over with minimum investable assets of US$100,000. Just over a quarter were millennials aged 25-38.
The findings show sustainable investing interest is reaching new levels, even with the economic uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Millennial interest in sustainable investing grew by four points to 99%, compared to a six point decline to 79% among the general population.
Yet there’s a paradoxical finding: Despite record levels of interest, more millennials—83% opposed to 70% in the general population—believe the debunked “trade-off” myth that sustainable investing means sacrificing returns.
For Matt Slovik, head of global sustainable finance at Morgan Stanley, it was one of the most interesting findings of the survey.
“This shows that if you look at the percentage of millennials that are interested in sustainable investing, there’s a real desire and recognition that finance can do more,” Stovik says. “And there’s more to finance than simply focusing on the return aspect.”
Morgan Stanley found no trade-off between financial performance between sustainable and traditional U.S. equity funds between 2004 and 2020, and as millennial investors become more educated and move into this investing arena they have the power to transform it.
Slovik spoke to Penta about some of the most surprising insights the survey unearthed about millennial investors.
New Face of Financial Consumption
“There’s a desire to consume finance in many of the same ways that millennials and others have really taken to clothing and food and other things in their lives,” Slovik says. Just as millennial investors ask questions about impact, sourcing, and production when shopping for themselves, they’re starting to look at their portfolios with a similar fine tooth comb. “I think that the finance and the integration of sustainability considerations is a natural evolution outgrowth of that trend.”
Slovik said multiple factors contribute to these changing habits, from the way millennials drive consumption, to where they were in life during the financial crisis, to the impacts they’re seeing from climate change.
“All of that really informs the fact that the data seems to suggest that they’re thinking holistically and more broadly about their investments than I think we’ve seen broadly and historically,” he says.
Greenwashing Won’t Cut It
It’s not just that millennial investors are looking for key data, there’s a higher watermark for what they find. Millennial investors have more sophisticated demands for what it means to do environmental or sustainable good, and lower tolerance for greenwashing, where companies make green claims that aren’t backed up through practices.
Sustainable Signals uncovered a growing concern over how authentic a firm’s ESG activities are. On a question about barriers to including sustainable investing for individuals the second place answer was brand new to this year’s survey: “concerns about authenticity or greenwashing.” (A third, also new, was “lack of tools to measure sustainable impact.”)
“As the market has evolved and matured, investors are focused on understanding what it is that they’re getting,” Slovik says. Though he says we’re entering a clear “data age of ESG” investing, thanks to increasing disclosures from companies and a growing number of data providers, he adds this is still in early days.
Among the resources available to investors, he says, is Morgan Stanley’s own Impact Quotient (or IQ) program that helps provide additional transparency for clients on over 100 environmental or impact preferences.
“As people are better able to understand the impact or exposure or alignment of their investments, you’re also seeing a desire to bring those in line with personal or organizational mission and goals,” Slovik says.
Money Follows Social Movements
Though climate change is still a top concern for millennial investors, there’s evidence that their definition of sustainability is expanding.
“Millennials are looking for more out of finance, and I think this idea of sustainability really does connect with the way that they seem to see the world more broadly,” Slovik says. Two things which have impacted that world view recently have been the pandemic and the racial justice movement.
The pandemic shifted investors’ thematic priorities when it comes to sustainability. Covid-19 led millennials to a heightened interest in addressing public health through their investment activity (69% of millennials compared to 61% of the general population) as well as supporting small businesses (68% to 61% of the general population).
Millennials believe their money has the power to change. The previous Sustainable Signals paper noted 85% of millennials believe their investments could influence climate change, and 89% that their investments could lift people out of poverty.
The 2021 report also finds 75% of millennial investors have made or plan to make investment changes within 12 months in response to racial justice movements. Comparatively, only 50% of the general population planned to do the same.
Slovik says this trend has accelerated since last summer, though it existed before. This type of investment shift can include “supporting diverse-owned, or -run asset managers, to thinking about how individual companies may either excel or lag related to racial equity records,” he adds.
Reprinted by permission of Penta. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: November 23, 2021.
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Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
4 min
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
