A group of students from the laboratory of Professor Kotaro Inoue and Assistant Professor Yosuke Kimura at Tokyo Tech’s School of Engineering have won second place in the Bloomberg ESG Investment Contest 2022, a contest for bachelor and graduate-level students on the theme of ESG investments. The finals, which included four teams, were held in Tokyo on October 25.
The Bloomberg ESG Investment Contest is held annually by Bloomberg, an economic and market information provider. This year’s competition was the largest of its kind, with 324 participants and 61 teams from universities in Japan.
Tokyo Tech’s runner-up team was a six-member group consisting of four 4th-year students and two 1st-year master’s students from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Economics.
The student group received high marks for their highly original, creative ideas and persuasive presentation, which focused on a “shift to sustainable energy that is resilient to geopolitical risk.” They quantified their ideas in a logical manner based on various previous studies and reflected their findings in their investment strategy. In particular, the investment strategy was responsive to changes in global attitudes toward ESG investment in the wake of the recent situation in Ukraine, and was evaluated as interesting and informative from the standpoint of various groups, including professional institutional investors.
Tokyo Tech runner-up team at Bloomberg ESG Investment Contest 2022
- Minhyung Kang
4th year, Industrial Engineering and Economics
- Takuma Ishii
4th year, Industrial Engineering and Economics
- Tomohiro Ogawa
4th year, Industrial Engineering and Economics
- Yosuke Osakabe
4th year, Industrial Engineering and Economics
- Kazuki Ichihara
1st-year master’s student, Industrial Engineering and Economics
- Nozomi Sumiya
1st-year master’s student, Industrial Engineering and Economics
Comments from team representative
Minhyung Kang
4th year, Industrial Engineering and Economics
It is my sincere pleasure to announce that we have been awarded the runner-up prize in the very prestigious 2022 Bloomberg ESG Investment Contest. This achievement was made possible by the strength of the entire group and the appropriate advice of Professor Inoue and Assistant Professor Kimura of our laboratory.
The theme of this competition is “to independently evaluate a company’s ESG initiatives and manage a virtual fund with the selected stocks.” With the recent increase in geopolitical risks, energy supply and demand risks are covering the entire world. The originality of indexing this risk based on data and reflecting it in our investment strategy was recognized, and we were able to achieve the runner-up position. We are also deeply grateful to the judges for recognizing the value of our investment policy. In the process of writing the report for this contest, we studied many previous academic papers and institutional investor reports, which led us to learn a lot and also gave us hints for deciding our future research topics.
Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of my laboratory for their cooperation in this contest, and I would also like to thank my professors for giving us the opportunity to participate in this contest.
