Tuesday, 9 February 2010 at 10:02, Reuters, Beijing
China Investment Corp, the country's $300bn sovereign wealth fund, has made its biggest US equity bets in natural resources and financial stocks.
A filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission detailed equity holdings in US listed companies and funds worth $9.63bn at the end of 2009.
About a quarter of the investments is in exchange-traded funds, giving CIC exposure to markets in Europe, Asia and emerging markets at a low cost.
The filing, made last Friday, is not exhaustive. It does not include investments entrusted to outside fund managers or CIC's stake in private equity house Blackstone.
CIC paid $3bn for a 10 per cent stake in Blackstone in 2007 and bought more shares in 2008.
The biggest holding listed in the SEC filing, worth $3.54bn, was in Canadian miner Teck Resources Ltd.
Among US holdings, CIC declared a stake of $1.77bn in Morgan Stanley and a previously unannounced $713.8m holding in BlackRock Inc, the world's largest independent money manager.
CIC has made no secret of its ambitions to develop its own investment expertise so it can manage more of its money by itself, cutting down on fees in the process.
Lou Jiwei, the chairman of CIC, said the fund would manage more of its investments in developed markets internally this year and steadily accelerate its overseas investments, the China Securities Journal reported.
"As of now, most of CIC's overseas funds are managed by outside portfolio managers, but we will gradually increase in-house investment in more efficient developed markets in the future," the newspaper paraphrased Lou as saying in an article he published on Monday. It did not say where the article appeared.
CIC has been investing intensively in resources and commodities since 2009, mainly because there is still plenty of room for price gains in those sectors, Lou said.
CIC also needed to hedge against the risk of inflation as the world economy picked up, he added.
Lou restated CIC's policy to operate the fund as a financial investor seeking to maximise its returns, not to control the companies in which it invests.
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