#Kuwait’s $124 Billion Pension Fund Plans Infrastructure Boost - Bloomberg

Kuwait’s $124 Billion Pension Fund Plans Infrastructure Boost - Bloomberg

Kuwait’s $124 billion pension fund, which posted a record first-half profit, plans to double its infrastructure investment and boost exposure to private equity, its director general said.

The new plan, developed with U.S.-based consultancy Mercer LLC, will start next year and will “entail increasing infrastructure from 5% to 10% as well as fine tuning some of the other allocations,” Meshal Al-Othman, who heads the Public Institution for Social Security, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.

The fund is looking to raise private equity’s weight to 13% of its portfolio from 10% while lowering its allocation for equities to 22% from 27%, he said. Its cash currently accounts for 10% of the total, and the plan is to reduce it to 4% by March.

“We started off with a very high cash cushion, we still have a huge cushion,” he said.