Yngve Slyngstad knows all about the benefits of diversification. Recruited in the late 1990s as the first equities chief at Norges Bank Investment Management, the manager of Norway’s giant sovereign wealth fund, Slyngstad bought stocks aggressively and quickly made the fund one of the largest investors in the European market. Now CEO of NBIM, Slyngstad is looking to pursue diversification across a broader front. Last month he went to the Ministry of Finance and requested authorization to substantially increase the emerging-markets allocation of the Government Pension Fund Global, as the sovereign fund is called, because of the growing size of those countries in the global economy. The fund has roughly $50 billion of its $555 billion in assets in emerging markets or in companies heavily involved in those markets. Slyngstad wants to increase that figure by two thirds, to almost $85 billion, by the end of next year.
“We need to be part of the growth in the global economy,” he tells Institutional Investor.
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