About Us

We offer a wide range of investment and financial planning solutions to protect and grow your long-term wealth.

Sanlam Investments is one of South Africa’s largest investment management companies. We offer a comprehensive range of local and offshore investment products to end-investors, financial planners and institutions. Our investment options include passively and actively managed unit trusts, hedge funds and segregated and pooled retirement funds.

At Sanlam Investments, we aim to protect and grow your wealth over the long term.

Many factors influence the investment performance that enables us to achieve this goal. We successfully combine these factors to deliver strong performance across the investment range. We take particular pride in:

Sanlam’s longevity and innovation. We have been around for almost a century and have always successfully adapted to our investors’ needs.

People, teamwork and values. Our employees are driven by passion and actively strive to be transparent and innovative.

A culture of diversity and commitment to growing our own timber. At Sanlam Investments, transformation is imperative and our internal programmes help develop tomorrow’s black investment professionals and business leaders.

Our robust, tested and proven pragmatic investment process and philosophy. Our performance history highlights the success we have achieved for our clients by committing to our investment philosophy.

Our Investment Philosophy

As value investors, we make use of the opportunities created when prices differ from their fair value.

We believe that financial markets are inefficient because the market participants are driven by emotions. These emotions cause asset prices to move away from their fair values, which creates investment opportunities for patient investors. Also, as various market participants have different investment time frames and liquidity requirements, assets can become mispriced in the short term. Generally, we invest in assets that are trading below our fair value estimate and disinvest from assets that are trading above our fair value estimate. We use a fair value framework based on the assumption that assets revert to their long-term average real returns.

Our philosophy is based on rational decisions and thorough research.

All our investment decisions are firmly rooted in this philosophy. What this means in practice is that our team of analysts conducts in-depth research to gain insights into what an asset is truly worth, as opposed to what investors are willing to pay because of greed or fear. Based on this, our fund managers make decisions that take advantage of these market efficiencies, without being influenced by emotions. As we are valuation-based investors, we are convinced that by sticking to our guns in the long-term and riding out volatile and uncertain periods, we will be able to deliver consistent, compelling long-term investment performance for our clients.

We Embrace Diversity Through Transformation

Sanlam Investments has made significant strides in improving black representation in leadership positions and the rest of the business. We have ongoing initiatives that lay out specific career paths and engage in succession planning to empower and develop the skills of our black staff. We are currently at a level 3 score according to the standards of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in recognition of our black economic empowerment credentials.

Some of our exciting transformational initiatives include:

Appointing interns

Investment Professional Development Programme (IPDP)

Formal mentoring programmes

Leading Edge leadership development programme

Transformation Task Team

Corporate Governance

As a large institutional investor, Sanlam Investments has sizeable investments in most of South Africa’s companies. This places us in a position to influence and encourage the companies in which we invest to adopt sound governance principles. As corporate citizens, we feel that this is our responsibility and it makes long-term investment sense.

We are signatories to both the Code for Responsible Investing in South Africa (CRISA) and its forerunner, the United Nations-backed Principles of Responsible Investing (UNPRI).