Norway’s massive sovereign wealth fund on Wednesday posted first-half profit of 1.48 trillion kroner ($138 billion), primarily driven by robust returns on its investments in technology stocks, CNBC reported.
The so-called Government Pension Fund Global — the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — said it had a value of 17.75 trillion kroner ($1.65 tn) at the end of June.
The fund’s overall return for the six-month period was 8.6%, which was 0.04 percentage points lower than the return on its benchmark index.
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, said on Wednesday that equity investments gave a “very strong” return in the first half of the year.
“The result was mainly driven by the technology stocks, due to increased demand for new solutions in artificial intelligence,” Tangen noted.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund said its equity portfolio posted a return of 12.5% through the first half of the year, while its fixed income and unlisted real estate portfolios incurred marginal losses.
The fund reported negative returns of 17.7% on its unlisted renewable energy infrastructure portfolio across the first six months of the year. It said higher capital costs had adversely affected the value of investments in the period from January to June.
Looking ahead, NBIM’s Tangen said in a news conference that stock markets were not expected to rise in the way they had done in previous years, according to Reuters.
Tangen reportedly said that a lot of uncertainty and a “completely different geopolitical situation” meant there were now more risks to global stocks.
One of the world’s largest investors, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund was established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of the country’s oil and gas sector. To date, the fund has put money in more than 8,700 companies in over 70 countries around the world.
In comparison, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund reported a significant profit for 2023, after posting a loss the previous year due to market decline and the tech downturn. The PIF, which has $977 billion in assets, reported a 2023 profit of $17.2 billion in a July 2024 filing with the London Stock Exchange, compared to a loss of $3.9 billion in 2022.