Stewardship engagement

This year we continued to enhance our process for the escalation of stewardship on climate, natural capital and human rights management. The escalation is a vote to hold directors accountable for not meeting what we regard as minimum expectations related to the management of these financially material risks. The result was a vote against directors at 52 companies based on our assessments.

• During the first half of 2025, 67% of our engagement objectives continued to show progress and we moved 11 of our engagement objectives to successful closure, with the strategies or measures we see as best practice successfully implemented by the company.
• In the first half of 2025, UBS-AM actively engaged with 127 companies on sustainability-related topics through a total of 157 meetings.
• Successfully progressed engagements with seven companies on implementing new or improved climate transition plans in Europe and the US, and across the energy and chemicals sectors
• Implemented an expansion of our social engagements, adding a focus on product quality and safety
• We closed our engagement with two companies on topics related to board composition where we saw improvements in the diversity of the overall board

Globally, approximately 70% of all shareholder voting activity takes place in the first half of the year. In all we voted at more than 8,000 company meetings on nearly 91,000 agenda items.

• In H1 2025 we voted against management on at least one agenda item at 65% of the meetings voted.
• We voted against management most frequently due to recurring concerns about executive compensation, including overall disclosure on pay, policies, scale and metric.
• Concerns regarding board composition was the second most frequent topic in our votes against management.
• The evolution of our approach to director voting has enabled us to continue to express our investor view clearly to companies on financially material topics.
• We maintained our high level of support for shareholder proposals, representing close to half of all proposals we voted on, reflecting increased support for governance related proposals.
• We applied an expanded approach for votes related to minimum expectations for climate and natural capital management.
• In the first half, we voted against the chair of the sustainability committee (or equivalent) as a way of reflecting our view at 52 company meetings, which represented 0.6% of all the company meetings we voted in the period.