Sasja Beslik: the investor who stuck to his ESG guns

Glance through the history of Nordic sustainable finance and the name Sasja Beslik will become familiar. The former head of sustainable finance at Nordea was behind Sweden’s first carbon neutral equity fund back in 2005. A short stint at PFA and a sustainability-linked knighthood by Swedish royalty followed.

These days Beslik spends his time in Tokyo, running an ESG fund in Japan’s listed equity markets. Over the past four years – amid the ESG backlash – it generated 84% in total net returns and 16.5% in annualised performance.

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Beslik took Net Zero Investor behind the scenes of an audacious investment strategy and the performance it generated.

Japan bound

To some extent Japan had always been on Beslik’s radar. He even visited the land of the rising sun during his years at Nordea. Beslik went back and forth in his mind – about Japan’s ESG investment opportunity and what, if anything, he could do with it.

“Then I actually sat down and conducted research on the Japanese market”, he recalls. “It led me to conclude that this is a misinterpreted market and there’s lots of opportunity here”.

Beslik was convinced Japanese ESG equities were mispriced. In early 2022, he moved to Japan to prove his theory. SDG Impact Japan’s NextGen ESG Fund was launched in April that year with Beslik as its chief investment strategist.

Next Gen

The fund operates at a relatively lower scale compared to Beslik’s previous launches. As of February 2026 it had $44.2m under management.

Beslik decided to target the mid-cap segment in listed equities – which accounted for some 77% of Japanese companies by his account. “These are not priced from an ESG perspective because they are bad on disclosure. Just 20% of these companies were covered by sell-side analysts so there’s very little information”, he notes.

Beslik’s experience in sustainable investing kicked in at this point. “I realised that some of these companies have a value premium from an ESG perspective, but they do not communicate that”, he adds.

Foreign investors in Japanese mid-caps have mountains to climb, Beslik points out. Language barriers aside, Japanese investors in the segment weren’t used to working with foreigners. Beslik had a solution.

“If I have a local team that is competent [in ESG mid-cap investing] we can bridge that gap. Which we actually did. This is the trick of the Japanese market”, he says.

He assembled a team that had experience in mid-caps and synced well with Beslik’s engagement-heavy investment style. Then, they got to work.

Alpha search

The fund operates with a ‘high-conviction, long-only’ model. The plan was to identify well run businesses with ‘under-realised sustainability levers for margin, ROIC and cash-flow improvement’.

Beslik and his team would carefully sift through companies to search for ESG alpha – sustainability improvements that could unlock higher capital efficiency and returns. More importantly, they had to find companies willing to onboard their vision.

Horizon is the other key piece of Beslik’s puzzle. For the logic to work, sustainability driven competitiveness needs time to mature. “There is no company that can do these improvements in a year or two. The challenge is to maintain focus and reach objectives over three to five years”, he affirms.

The strategy is in its fourth year now. Over a quarter of its funds are invested in materials players. Aluminium maker UACJ is its largest exposure. Industrial and consumer stocks are other leading allocations. The top ten positions account for 64.4% of NAV.

Backlash, what backlash

Perhaps the most striking part of Beslik’s ESG fund returns is their timing. The years between 2022 and 2026 witnessed intense ESG backlash in the US and elsewhere. Asset managers retreated from alliances. Bankers and insurers did too. Greenhushing became more norm than exception.

Beslik persevered. “The backlash for me is just another mountain to climb. ESG is basically a signal that you’re looking at for value generation. I never saw it as virtue driven. I believe in it from a value perspective”, he says.

“We’ve been told to the change the ESG name”, he admits. A query Beslik does not agree with.

“If you’re here for the short term, I understand if you change the name. If you’re here for the long run, that’s a completely different game”, Beslik explains.

There is also the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war in Iran catapulting energy security into the spotlight. “The Japanese have a big wake up moment right now”, he says citing fossil fuel dependencies.

Armed with a performance track record, the fund is now looking to scale up. “I think the sweet spot for this type of fund is $350m – $400m”, Beslik says.

Beslik’s Japanese adventures add yet another chapter in his sustainable investment journey. A journey that began before ESG investing became mainstream and has endured the backlash in recent years. “We believe in what we believe in”, says the ESG investor who stuck to his guns.

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