Nederlands
Our fund strives to ensure the health of your pension on the long term. This aim is enshrined in the mission of the fund: 'The Astellas Pension Fund wants to be a future-proof and reliable pension fund for its current and past participants and pensioners which can continue to meet pension agreements.' The fund ensures this by investing pension contributions in the most effective and careful way. The investment plan provides information on how the fund invests.
Return
A pension fund receives return on investments. 'Return' is the profit from investments, which continually increases the assets of the fund. Pensions cannot be paid without a good return. In the long term, the return on investments is considerably higher than putting money aside in a savings account.
Investment plan
The Board has drawn up an investment plan that details the fund's investment method and types of investments. The fund has also formulated investment policy principles which, amongst other things, state that the Board wishes to invest in accordance with 'corporate social responsibility'. In light of this, the fund does not invest in companies that make use of child labour or where the freedom to belong to a trade union is restricted.
The Board is assisted by professionals so as to gain advice in terms of investments. In addition to this, the Board carries out a study every three years in order to garner information on the future developments of a pension fund. This study gives the Board the opportunity to evaluate various policy variables, such as investment policy, financing policy and indexation policy, in conjunction with each other. This process is known as an 'asset and liability management' (ALM).
There are always risks involved in investment. Investments may decrease in value. This is called 'negative return'. If there are bad conditions at the stock exchange, this will be reflected immediately in the pension fund's assets. In light of this, pension funds do as much as they can to manage the risks as effectively as possible. They do this by spreading their investments across various types of investments around the globe. The fund currently has the following distribution of investments:
- Fixed-interest values: 60%
- Equities: 30%
- Immovable property: 10%
The role of interest rates
Interest rates play an important role, as an increase or decrease in the interest rate has a large and immediate impact on a pension fund. For instance, if the interest rate falls, then the pension funds must set aside more money in order to be able to pay all their pensions in the future. In that case, the pensions become 'more expensive,' as it were, because more money is needed in the long term to meet all the fund's obligations.