The Fund utilises abrdn's Sustainable and Responsible Investment process to invest primarily in a concentrated portfolio of companies that are listed or proceeding to list on the ASX.

Benefits of investing in the abrdn Sustainable Australian Equities Fund

Investing in the Fund offers a number of benefits, including:

• Access to investment opportunities and diversification that individual investors usually cannot achieve on their own.

• A disciplined risk management process that manages different levels of investment risk relative to anticipated investment returns.

• Investment professionals who are part of a globally integrated network with global research capabilities delivering their best investment ideas and capabilities to clients around the world.

• The integration of environmental, social and governance factors into every stage of our investment process. Our goal is to reduce risk, enhance potential value for our investors and foster companies that can contribute positively to the world.

• Participation in any income distributions from the Fund.

Investor suitability

About the Fund

The Fund is a high conviction actively managed Australian equity portfolio utilising our sustainable and responsible investment equity strategy that seeks to generate strong long-term performance by allocating capital to companies which demonstrate that they are sustainable leaders and improvers versus their peers, through their management of environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities.

There are four key steps to our investment approach.

• Idea generation - Face-to-face meetings anchor how we understand and challenge the key elements of a company's fundamentals. This first-hand experience allows us to produce wide-ranging, company level insights that drive portfolio performance.

• Research - Our equity teams use a common investment language and research framework that structures how we express our thinking on companies. We have also developed a proprietary research platform used by all our equity teams, giving instant access to our research globally. Every company that we invest in is given a proprietary overall Quality rating and a component of this is the ESG Quality rating which enables us to identify sustainable leaders and improvers.

• Peer review - Team debate brings disciplined checks and challenges to our process. Through this collaborative approach we ensure only the best investment ideas make it into our final portfolios.

• Portfolio construction - We build our portfolios from the bottom-up, ensuring that only the highest-conviction stock ideas enter our portfolios. In addition, we use our proprietary ESG House Score to identify and exclude those companies exposed to the highest ESG risks within high and medium risk sectors. Finally, binary exclusions are applied to exclude the particular areas of investment.

How we invest your money

The Fund will aim to generate strong long-term performance over the benchmark by allocating capital to best-in-class ESG (environmental, social and governance) companies, as well as those seeking to improve ESG practices and uphold recognised sustainability standards.

The Fund will target a weighted average carbon intensity at least 20% lower than the benchmark for the Fund.*

The Fund will not invest in companies which have a revenue contribution:

• of 5% or more from tobacco and 0% from tobacco manufacturers

• of 5% or more from gambling of 10% or more from unconventional oil and gas extraction or are investing in new unconventional extraction capacity in their own operations

• from thermal coal extraction

• from the manufacture or sale of conventional weapons or weapons support systems

• In addition, the Fund will not invest in companies which:

• have failed to uphold one or more principles of the UN Global Compact, including the principles relating to labour standards

• are involved in controversial weapons covering; cluster munitions, anti-personnel landmines, nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, depleted uranium ammunition and blinding lasers

• are primarily involved in conventional oil and gas extraction and do not have a significant revenue contribution from natural gas or renewable alternatives

• are directly involved in electricity generation which has a carbon emission intensity inconsistent with the Paris Agreement 2 degrees scenario

• are directly investing in new thermal coal or nuclear electricity generation capacity in their own operations

Mix of asset classes

• 90-100% Australian equity securities

• 0-10% Cash

The Fund is generally fully invested in Australian equity securities.