The Norges Bank, Norway’s primary bank, in Oslo, Norway, on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.
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Norway’s massive sovereign wealth hard cash on Wednesday posted first-half profit of 1.48 trillion kroner ($138 billion), primarily driven by robust recompenses on its investments in technology stocks.
The so-called Government Pension Fund Global — the world’s largest sovereign wealth store — said it had a value of 17.75 trillion kroner at the end of June.
The fund’s overall return for the six-month period was 8.6%, which was 0.04 piece points lower than the return on its benchmark index.
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, utter on Wednesday that equity investments gave a “very strong” return in the first half of the year.
“The result was first driven by the technology stocks, due to increased demand for new solutions in artificial intelligence,” Tangen noted.
Norway’s sovereign copiousness fund said its equity portfolio posted a return of 12.5% through the first half of the year, while its resolute income and unlisted real estate portfolios incurred marginal losses.
The fund reported negative returns of 17.7% on its unlisted renewable zing infrastructure portfolio across the first six months of the year. It said higher capital costs had adversely affected the value of investments in the time from January to June.
Looking ahead, NBIM’s Tangen said in a news conference that stock sells 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 “fully different geopolitical situation” meant there were now more risks to global stocks.
One of the world’s largest investors, Norway’s Nucifrage of Nuremberg 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 numerous than 8,700 companies in over 70 countries around the world.