The International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IFSWF) has created a database of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) direct equity investments starting in January 2015.
The data is grouped for private equity, infrastructure, and real estate. We think these asset classes have different risk/return profiles, and would be confusing to present them together.
We have created this database to further encourage disclosure and transparency among the sovereign wealth fund community and provide an accurate representation of the strategies sovereign wealth funds employ when allocating capital in global equity markets. We hope that this endeavour will help actors in financial markets and the specialist media better understand this diverse and unique group of investors.
Data should not be compared with previous years because of revisions due to improved or adjusted data or methodology. Totals might not add up due to rounding.
- Institutional Coverage
In our database we include IFSWF members and sovereign wealth funds that are not members that we believe conform to the definition set out in the Santiago Principles: “special purpose investment funds or arrangements that are owned by the general government. Created by the general government for macroeconomic purposes, SWFs hold, manage, or administer assets to achieve financial objectives, and employ a set of investment strategies that include investing in foreign financial assets.”
It is worth noting that this definition excludes foreign currency reserves held by central banks for monetary policy purposes, even those that in some instances manage part of the foreign exchange reserves like a sovereign wealth funds such as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), or the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA).
After a rigorous research and assessment process we have settled on a group of more than 60 state-owned investors.
- SWFs tracked in the Database
SWF Name SWF Country Year Fundo Soberano de Angola Angola 2012 Pula Fund Botswana 1994 Cape Verde Sovereign Wealth Fund Cape Verde 2015 Fonds Souverain de Djibouti Djibouti 2020 The Sovereign Fund of Egypt Egypt 2018 Ethiopian Investment Holdings Ethiopia 2022 Fonds Gabonais d’Investissements Stratégiques Gabon 2012 Ghana Petroleum Funds Ghana 2011 Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund Ghana 2014 Libyan Investment Authority Libya 2006 Fonds National des Revenus des Hydrocarbures Mauritania 2006 Mauritius Investment Corporation Mauritius 2020 Ithmar Capital Morocco 2011 Welwitschia Fund Namibia 2022 Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority Nigeria 2012 Agaciro Development Fund Rwanda 2012 Fonds Souverain d’Investissements Stratégiques (FONSIS) Senegal 2012 Petroleum Investment Fund Uganda 2015 SWF Name SWF Country Year Fondo para la Revolución Industrial Productiva (FINPRO) Bolivia 2012 Fundo Soberano de Estado do Espírito Santo (FUNSES) Brazil (Espirito Santo) 2019 Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund Canada (Alberta) 1976 Northwest Territories Heritage Fund Canada (Northwest Territories) 2012 The Generations Fund Canada (Quebec) 2006 Economic and Social Stabilization Fund Chile 2006 Pension Reserve Fund Chile 2006 Fideicomiso Fondo de Ahorro y Estabilización (FAE) Colombia 2011 Fondo de Ahorro y Estabilización (FAE) Colombia 2011 Natural Resources Fund Guyana 2019 Fondo Mexicano del Petróleo para la Estabilización y el Desarrollo Mexico 2014 Fondo de Estabilización de los Ingresos Petroleros Mexico 2000 Fondo de Ahorro de Panamá Panama 2012 Fondo de Estabilización Fiscal (FEF) Peru 1999 Savings and Stabilisation Fund Suriname 2019 Heritage and Stabilization Fund Trinidad and Tobago 2000 Alabama Trust Fund USA (Alabama) 1985 Alaska Permanent Fund USA (Alaska) 1976 New Mexico State Investment Council USA (New Mexico) 1958 North Dakota Legacy Fund USA (North Dakota) 2011 Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund USA (Wyoming) 1974 SWF Name SWF Country Year Armenian National Interests Fund (ANIF) Armenia 2019 State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan Azerbaijan 1999 Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company Bahrain 2006 Future Generation Reserve Fund Bahrain 2006 Bhutan Economic Stabilisation Fund Bhutan 2018 Druk Holdings & Investments Ltd Bhutan 2007 China Investment Corporation China 2007 Indonesia Investment Authority (INA) Indonesia 2021 National Infrastructure Investment Fund India 2017 National Development Fund of Iran Iran 2011 National Oil Fund Kazakhstan 2000 Samruk-Kazyna Kazakhstan 2008 Kuwait Investment Authority Kuwait 1953 Khazanah Nasional BHD Malaysia 1992 Future Heritage Fund Mongolia 2016 Fiscal Stabilisation Fund Mongolia 2016 Oman Investment Fund Oman 2006 Palestine Investment Fund Palestinian Authority 2003 Qatar Investment Authority Qatar 2005 Public Investment Fund Saudi Arabia 1975 GIC Pte. Ltd Singapore 1981 Temasek Holdings Singapore 1974 Korea Investment Corporation South Korea 2005 Petroleum Fund of Timor–Leste Timor-Leste 2005 Turkey Wealth Fund Turkey 2017 ADQ UAE 2018 Abu Dhabi Investment Authority UAE 1976 Emirates Investment Authority UAE 2007 Investment Corporation of Dubai UAE 2006 Mubadala Investment Company UAE 2002 State Capital Investment Corp. Vietnam 2006 SWF Name SWF Country Year Société Fédérale de Participations et d'Investissement-Société Fédérale de Participations (SFPI-FPIM) Belgium 2006 National Investment Fund Cyprus 2019 Bpifrance Investissements (formerly CDC International Capital) France 2014 GrowthFund Greece 2016 Ireland Strategic Investment Fund Ireland 2001 CDP Equity Italy 2011 Malta Government Investments Malta 2013 National Development and Social Fund Malta 2015 Fonds de Réserve constitutionnel (FRC) Monaco 1962 Government Pension Fund Global Norway 1990 Russian Direct Investment Fund Russian Federation 2012 National Wealth Fund Russian Federation 2008 COFIDES Spain 1997 SWF Name SWF Country Year Future Fund Australia 2006 NSW Generations Fund Australia (New South Wales) 2018 Revenue Equalization Reserve Fund Kiribati 1956 Micronesia and Marshall Islands Trust Funds Micronesia/Marshall Islands 2016 Intergenerational Trust Fund for the People of the Republic of Nauru Nauru 2015 New Zealand Superannuation Fund New Zealand 2003 It is important to note that our database excludes transactions by sovereign wealth funds portfolio companies. This is particularly important for funds such as Kazakhstan’s Samruk-Kazyna, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional, Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, whose assets include government holdings in strategic companies.
Where relevant, we record the initial capitalisation of the companies and any subsequent investment in them. This not only prevents double counting, but also prevents us from erroneously capturing transactions that are commercial mergers and acquisition activities, rather than investments that are part of the parent sovereign wealth funds investment strategy.
For example, we would not include any acquisitions carried out by ST Telemedia, a telecommunications and media company wholly owned by Temasek, as this reflects the strategy of the company, not its parent. Neither do we include subsidiaries and/or funds open to external investors, such as Vertex Venture Holdings, a venture capital firm owned by Temasek Holdings, which invests capital provided by external investors as well as Temasek.
This distinction is not often made in commercially available mergers and acquisitions databases, and, therefore, may result in our overall investment values being lower than those reported by these providers.
- Asset Class Coverage
Although we consider all the funds listed to be sovereign wealth funds, not all of them will feature in our data. We have focused our data on direct equity investments in both public (listed) and private (unlisted) markets. Many of the institutions included in our list either have an investment mandate or liability profile that prevent them from investing in equity instruments or require them to use external investment managers.1
We do not include external investment mandates in our data. The information on these allocations varies too widely to be meaningful and many contracts with external managers are covered by client confidentiality clauses.
By recording their direct equity investments, we aim to study sovereign wealth funds strategic investments and partnerships and capture the nuances of how sovereign wealth funds structure investments. Consequently, we do not include small open-market transactions that appear to be undertaken as part of a passive equity strategy executed by internal management teams.
We do record the acquisition of convertible securities. However, we record when they were bought, not when they were exercised as several conversion dates maybe included in a single transaction.
In private-market investments we are careful to consider any debt facilities used by sovereign wealth funds to finance their acquisition. This is particularly important in real estate, for example, where the use of mortgages and the issuing for mortgage-backed securities is common practice. As a result, we only record the initial equity portion of the investment, rather than the top-line value of the asset. This means that the hard currency amount we record for each investment may be lower than the volumes suggested by other providers of information about sovereign wealth fund activity.
In the case of joint ventures or consortium acquisitions where the total amount is disclosed, but individual contributions are not, we estimate the value by taking into consideration the number of investors, financing and typical investment behaviour by the fund in question. For example, several sovereign wealth funds disclose that they do not take stakes over a certain percentage of the equity of a company, so this is an integral part of assessing the size of the investment.
- Data Collection
We collect data from publicly available sources. However, it might come as a surprise that we do not use any commercial mergers and acquisitions databases to provide us with information. Our team’s experience of using these is that they are often inaccurate and/or incomplete as they do not focus on sovereign wealth funds specifically.
Instead, we use a range of online tools to mine data from primary sources such as regulatory and stock-exchange filings as well as press releases. This enables us to assess the real information in the public domain, rather than relying on an interpretation of this information that may have missed vital nuances about the structuring of an investment in the private markets, or may not have noticed that a stake in a public company may have been built up by a sovereign wealth fund over a number of weeks or months, rather than in one go. This is an important nuance as it will generally affect the headline value of the investment.
This is the most accurate way of collecting data in real-time. However, it has provided us with some challenges when creating a database going back more than two years as some filings and disclosures are no longer in the public domain. As a result, we limited our database to starting in 2015, but we may have missed some transactions in the earlier part of our data.
Additionally, each year, after collecting the data, we give IFSWF members the opportunity to highlight any material errors or inaccuracies in the information we have gathered on them. We receive input from a number – but not all – of our members, as some have legal limits on what they can disclose to third parties.
- Currency
We report all our data in real US dollars. These are converted from local currency on the date of the completion of the investment, as opposed to the announcement. We use the data from xe.com. In the case of slowly built stakes in public companies we have developed a formula for providing a median value for the share price in local currency and the exchange rate.
- Regions, Markets, and Industries
We use the U.N. classification of global regions in the database to record the country in which the target company primarily operates. This country is not necessarily where it is headquartered or listed. If a company operates globally or regionally we defer to the location of the headquarters.
To offer additional insight into sovereign wealth fund investment strategies we use Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) regional indexes to group investments’ target countries by their level of market liquidity.
To identify the industry in which a company operates we follow a customised version of the Industry Classification Benchmark, to classify direct investments into 12 industries and 40 subsectors.
Footnotes
- An exception to this rule is Australia’s Future Fund. Although the Fund’s mandate requires it to use external managers to make investments, it often uses co-investment structures to take quasi-direct stakes in private companies, properties and infrastructure assets. We include these stakes in our data where they are disclosed.