Our KPI framework highlights businesses showing tangible sustainability progress and potential for long-term value creation.
Photo credit: Getty Images / Simon Skafar
Consumers, companies and investors worldwide are increasingly supporting sustainable business practices, while regulations promoting sustainability are expanding in developed and emerging markets. Our Emerging Markets Transition strategy invests in EM companies we believe are moving toward greater sustainability while demonstrating accelerating growth and improving fundamentals.
As companies modify and even transform their products and operations to support a more sustainable global economy, new opportunities emerge to access new markets and revenue streams, reduce costs over time, and lower risk.
A 2025 Deloitte sustainability report that surveyed 2,100 executives from companies in 27 countries found that nearly 80% of respondents are making sustainability a strategic priority in their business models, with revenue generation as the most-cited goal (66%), along with brand and reputation benefits (60%), risk management and resilience (55%), and cost reduction (55%).
Our EM Transition strategy targets firms in emerging markets that are typically in the early stages of this process and thus just starting to create value through these efforts.
This perspective addresses well-founded concerns that traditional ESG funds may miss promising businesses pursuing sustainability-related opportunities, especially in developing regions. These traditional strategies tend to focus on sustainability leaders, neglecting companies that are still in the early stages of generating value through sustainability initiatives.
We also note that EM companies may have fewer resources to devote to sustainability-focused disclosures and often face stakeholder pressures that differ from those typical indeveloped markets. Therefore, data on potentially material sustainability issues for EM companies can be hard to find. As a result, we believe many quality businesses transitioning to sustainability and benefiting financially from doing so are often overlooked by traditional sustainable investing strategies.
Please find more on the ACI_American Century Emerging Markets Transition Equity fund in the report attached and in the Fact Sheet.
Published by
American Century Investments
American Century Investments
