Welcome to the weekend, everybody. Here are the top stories from the past week:
- Government Ventures: The French government will fund Silicon Valley-based, French entrepreneurs.
- Recruitment: Australia’s Future Fund is looking to hire people with direct investment experience who can also think in terms of a broader portfolio. Good luck to ‘em.
- Lunch: APG CIO: “For a long period... diversification was the only ‘free lunch’ in the financial sector.” Not anymore apparently.
- Growth: Nigeria’s federal government is so happy with its new sovereign wealth fund, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), that it’s trying to allocate another $5 billion to the fund: “...a solid building block for our economy...”
- Layoffs: As part of its restructuring, Dutch pension PGGM will cut at least 200 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce. I can’t tell you how rare it is to see layoffs like this among pension funds globally.
- Overseas Expansion: Korea’s giant National Pension Service will continue setting up overseas offices. After New York, it has plans for another Asian office. (And here’s some research I did last year on the geographic expansion of pensions and sovereign wealth funds.)
- Collaboration I: FSI, Italy’s sovereign development fund, and the China Investment Corp. agreed to co-invest €500 million (about $640 million) each in companies that promote economic cooperation between the two countries.
- Collaboration II: The Russian Direct Investment Fund and Russia-China Investment Fund are cofunding technology parks in Russia and China. (ed. note: here’s more on economic collaboration between Russia and China.)
Have a great weekend!
