Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund increased its investment in US equities in the second-quarter, pouring money into technology, e-commerce, retail and finance companies.
While the value of the Public Investment Fund's investments in the US in the second-quarter declined 6 per cent from the first three months of the year amid a tech sell-off to nearly $41 billion, it invested about $7.6bn to snap up new stakes in 17 companies, a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday showed.
The PIF, which manages more than $620bn in assets, invested $464 million in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, about $474m in Microsoft and $507m in the video-conferencing company Zoom.
The fund invested nearly $434m in JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank and about $452m in BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager.
It also invested $482m in Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee house chain, $497m in Costco Wholesale Corporation, the third biggest retailer globally, $432m in Amazon, the biggest online e-commerce marketplace and $450m in Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the US.
The fund also invested $373m in Booking Holdings, an American travel technology company that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines that include Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com, Cheapflights, among others.
The sovereign wealth fund lies at the centre of the kingdom's Vision 2030 plan to diversify the Arab world's largest economy and reduce its reliance on oil. Under a five year strategy announced last year, the PIF aims to more than double the value of its assets under management to $1.07 trillion and to commit $40bn annually to develop Saudi Arabia's economy until 2025.
The fund has created 10 new sectors, set up more than 30 new companies, created 331,000 jobs in Saudi Arabia and more than tripled its assets in the past several years. Under its five-year plan, it will focus on 13 sectors as part of its core domestic strategy.
Other second-quarter investments include the software company Adobe, Advanced Micro Devices, a semiconductor company that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets, Datadog, a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications and Salesforce, a cloud-computing platform.
Other notable investments by the fund include Freeport-McMoRan, a mining company that is the world's largest producer of molybdenum, a major copper producer and operates the biggest gold mine globally in Papua, Indonesia.
The fund retained its share position in MultiPlan Corporation, a healthcare management software company, with the value increasing 17 per cent in the second-quarter to $281m. The value of the investment in Air Products and Chemicals, which sells gases and chemicals for industrial uses surged 255 per cent to about $646m.
The value of the fund's stake in game developer Electronic Arts increased 8 per cent to $1.95bn.
The PIF's US equity portfolio includes 53 companies as of the second-quarter.
Source: BBC
Image source: Pixabay
