Exercising voting rights at Pictet Asset Management

Exercising voting rights and responsibilities

The overarching purpose of our voting is to protect and promote the rights and long-term interests of our clients as shareholders. As such, we consider it our responsibility to hold companies and their executives accountable for their decisions. We aim to support a strong culture of corporate governance, effective management of environmental and social issues and comprehensive reporting according to credible standards.

The ShareAction report Voting Matters 2023 considered how 69 of the world’s largest asset managers voted on 257 key environmental and social resolutions in 2023. It found that Pictet Asset Management voted in favour of 91% of the resolutions where we had holdings. Of these, we supported 88% of the resolutions relating to environmental issues, 94% on social issues, and 93% on resolutions related to pay and politics.

Voting scope

Equity

For our equity funds, the following principles define the scope of accounts and securities eligible for proxy voting:

For actively managed funds, we aim to vote on 100 per cent of equity holdings.
For passive strategies, we aim to vote on companies representing 80 per cent by weight of underlying benchmarks. This target may be revised upwards or downwards for specific strategies depending on factors such as portfolio size, geography or market capitalisation.
For segregated accounts, including mandates and third-party (i.e. sub-advisory) mutual funds managed by Pictet Asset Management, clients delegating the exercise of voting rights to us have the choice between our policy or their own voting policy.

Multi asset

For our multi asset funds, voting takes place on the underlying equity funds managed by Pictet Asset Management. We also aim to vote where we have direct holdings in companies.

Voting guidelines

Our proxy voting guidelines, included within our Responsible Investment Policy, apply to all our investment strategies (we have not set any strategy-specific voting policies or guidelines) and are based on generally accepted standards of best practice in corporate governance. These include board and management, executive remuneration, risk control and reporting, and shareholder rights. The standards give a benchmark for assessing companies and exercising our active ownership duties throughout the life cycle of an investment, from pre-investment phase to engagement, proxy voting, up to the point of exit.

As active managers, we place significant importance on how we vote. The long-term interests of shareholders are our paramount objective. On occasion, we may vote against management if we believe that doing so is in the best interests of shareholders and our clients. Where we do this, we classify the vote as significant, in line with the EU Shareholder Rights Directive II, and we publicly disclose our rationale as part of our quarterly vote reporting. We also reserve the right to deviate from our voting policy to take into account company-specific circumstances.

We believe that governance, both for companies and countries, will come back to the fore and play a much more important role in investors’ agendas as the extended era of cheap money comes to an end.

Eric Borremans, Head of Environmental Social & Governance

Voting activity

The following charts provide an overview of Pictet Asset Management’s 2023 voting activity. These are aggregated data compiled during the year.

1. 2023 aggregated votes

Meeting overview

In 2023, Pictet Asset Management voted at 3’634 general assembly meetings out of 3’701 votable meetings for active and passive equities. We voted "against" (including "abstained" or "withhold") to at least one resolution at 1’617 meetings and we did not vote at 67 meetings.

graph5_ESG meetings_2024 — Fig. 1 - 2023 voting activity

Management resolutions

Out of 42’382 management resolutions we voted against management on 3'709 items (9%), supported management on 37'814 items (89%) and voted "abstain" on 759 items (2%).

We voted against management on resolutions that relate primarily to director election (41%), compensation (23%) and director related (12%)

fig11_breakdown of management resolutions_2024 — Fig. 2 - Breakdown of management resolutions not supported

Shareholder resolutions

We voted against 407 shareholder resolutions out of 1’200 proposals (34%).

The main categories of shareholder resolutions that we didn't support relates to environmental (16%), social (15%) and director election (13%) issues.

fig12_breakdown of shareholders resolutions_2024 — Fig. 3 - Breakdown of shareholder resolutions not supported

We supported 774 shareholder resolutions out of 1’200 proposals (65%).

The main categories of shareholder resolutions that we supported are related to social (24%), director election (20%) and environmental (15%) issues.

fig13_breakdown of supported resolutions_2024 — Fig. 4 - Breakdown of shareholder resolutions supported

Deviations from voting guidelines

In 2023 we deviated from third-party recommendations on 291 resolutions. The main categories we deviated were related to director election (153 resolutions), directors-related (64 resolutions) and compensation (46 resolutions).

fig14_breakdown of deviations_2024 — Fig. 5 - Breakdown of deviations from Pictet Asset Management's voting policy

2. Voting records

Monthly voting records can be viewed here:

Annual voting records can be viewed here:

Proxy voting