Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (Norway GPFG), missed its Q1 2024 return on the benchmark index by 0.10%.
Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Misses Q1 2024 Benchmark
The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, one of the largest global investors, announced that its market value had increased to $1.6tn on Thursday, 18 April 2024.
The fund further reported that most of its investments (72.1%) consisted of equities, 26% of fixed income, 1.8% of unlisted real estate, and 0.1% of renewable energy infrastructure. It reportedly gained 9.1% on stocks and lost about 0.4% on fixed-income investments.
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Trond Grande, LinkedIn
A Bloomberg report stated these Q1 results mirrored the Norway GPFG’s weaker financial performance during the last months of 2023. Trond Grande, the deputy CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, attributed the gains to bullish tech investments, saying:
Our equity investments had a very strong return in the first quarter, particularly driven by the tech sector.
Equities, except for the property sector, grew during Q1 2024. Despite this positive upturn, markets worldwide continue to struggle under persistent inflation. In a recent Bloomberg interview, Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, said that the inflationary impact on everything from commodities to labour costs continues to hamstring the global economy.
Grande confirmed the influence of big tech stocks, as these make up roughly 14% of the fund’s portfolio. He stated:
There’s a lot of merit to the enthusiasm surrounding AI, certainly in the hardware space. It’s still to be proven how you can monetize it also in the software space, but of course there’s a lot of gains priced into the stock of Microsoft and Meta on the basis of this.
