You could be forgiven for expecting a former chief financial officer at Eisai, a conservative, family-run Japanese pharmaceutical company, to be a buttoned-up number-cruncher. You might imagine someone focused solely on obscure financial metrics, earnings reports, and margin calculations.
But, while Ryohei Yanagi’s job at Eisai certainly required an appetite for such dry fare, he is also something of a maverick. For 15 years, he has surveyed close to 200 leading investors about corporate governance, as well as social and environmental issues in Japan. He did this long before ESG became a buzzword repeated on every earnings call.
One finding that stands out in his research is that the number of investors wanting companies to explain better how their ESG activities contribute to the bottom line has nearly doubled in the past six years. At the same time, the proportion of respondents saying ESG does not matter has fallen from a quarter to nearly zero.