Insto roundup: CIC does $674m Aussie property deal; Temasek sets up agri-business platform

AUSTRALIA / NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Superannuation Fund has booked a NZ$112 million ($76.3 million) loss after giving up on its eight-year punt on fuel cell startup Bloom Energy.

Source: NZ Herald

Gary Brader, QBE

QBE Insurance has become the first Australian insurance firm to join the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, which comprises 33 institutional investors that aim to have their portfolios achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 

QBE chief investment officer Gary Brader said the company would support renewable energy projects to contribute to a lower-carbon economy. The company plans to continue to operate on a carbon-neutral basis and work towards sourcing 100% of its electricity for operations from renewables by 2025. 

The addition of QBE brings the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance’s total assets under management to $5 trillion. 

Source: QBE Insurance

After 12 years at AustralianSuper, Daniel Berger has left the post of investment director for European real estate.

Berger will take up a new role of property and funds director at Delancey, a UK-based property and asset management advisory firm. He will be a member of the company’s steering committee, working closely with the executive team.

At AustralianSuper, Berger was responsible for a £1 billion ($1.31 billion) portfolio. He had previously worked at Perpetual, Macquarie Bank and Goldman Sachs.

Source: Investor Daily

CHINA

China Investment Corporation has paid A$925 million ($674 million) for a 50% stake in Sydney’s Grosvenor Place office tower in this year's biggest commercial property deal in Australia.

The deal is seen as evidence of a re-awakening of the office market in Australia’s largest city, after domestic commercial real estate transaction volumes fell by 43% in the first nine months of 2020.

CIC, which had $940 billion in assets under management as of 2018, is picking up the remaining slice of Grosvenor Place after it had originally bought a stake in the 32-year-old tower as part of its A$2.5 billion 2015 acquisition of Morgan Stanley's Investa office portfolio .

Source: Mingtiandi

INDONESIA

The Indonesian government reported that the US International Development Finance Corporation has signed a letter of intent to invest $2 billion into Indonesia’s new sovereign wealth fund, the Indonesia Investment Authority. 

The signing took place in Washington, DC last week. The US International Development Finance Corporation was not immediately available for comment.

Source: Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute

KOREA

Korea Post is seeking a custodian bank and a fund manager to provide asset custody and administration services for its investment mandates for three years.

The bank will be responsible for compliance and securities settlement, among other things, and the fund manager will handle verification of investment data and calculation of net asset value and will support securities trading, Korea Post said in a request for proposal published by the Korea Financial Investment Association on November 20.

The tender is open until December 4. Evaluation and due diligence are scheduled to be carried out between December 18 and December 23. The term of appointment will start on April 1, 2021.

Source: Asia Asset Management

Korea Teachers’ Pension Fund, which manages W15 trillion ($13.5 billion) of assets, is inviting bids from foreign and local asset managers for a domestic equity mandate of unspecified value.

It is split into a growth style strategy and a responsible investing strategy, with three managers to be selected for the former and two for the latter. Applications are open until November 25.

Source: Asia Asset Management

SINGAPORE

State investment firm Temasek has joined a series A financing round for Chinese biotech startup D3 Bio that raised $200 million. The other participants include Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, Boyu Capital and Shanghai-based pharmaceutical firm WuXi AppTec.

Similar local players in the biotech space include RecBio, which recently raised $226.6 million in a series B round from Sequoia Capital, and Temasek’s Vertex Ventures.

Sovereign wealth fund GIC is set to further its reach in European warehousing through a joint venture that aims to acquire and develop last-mile distribution centres and urban logistics assets in the continent’s gateway cities.

Financial terms of the JV with logistics investment manager Melcombe Partners were not disclosed. But GIC has in recent years been on a tear in acquiring global logistics assets, including portfolios integrated into the fund’s pan-European platform, P3 Logistic Parks.

The fund announced its link-up with Melcombe less than three months after the London-based investment manager, together with another asset manager CastleLake, sold a set of 28 last-mile facilities to Blackstone in a $321 million deal. Melcombe's focus is on western and northern Europe, where it manages distribution centres serving towns in dense regional hubs.

Source: Mingtiandi

Anuj Maheshwari, Temasek

Temasek International is setting up a new vehicle to help accelerate and manage agricultural and food investments as part of a multibillion-dollar push into that industry.

Anuj Maheshwari, managing director of agribusiness at the state investor, said the platform had two main goals: to help agri-food portfolio companies build the operational capabilities needed to get products off the drawing board and into the market, and to help them build the manufacturing and production scale "to the next level".

Temasek has become an increasingly important dealmaker in the sector globally. It has invested more than $5 billion in the agri-food industry in the past five years, backing fake-meat makers such as Impossible Foods, as Singapore aims to obtain 30% of its food requirements from local sources by 2030. Life science and agribusiness investments made up 8% of Temasek's S$306 billion ($228.15 billion) portfolio as of March, up from 4% in 2017.

Source: Business Times

Bureau of Labor Funds has appointed seven asset managers for a NT$35 billion ($1.22 billion) domestic relative return equity mandate, awarding each NT$5 billion for a five-year term.

The winning bidders are Allianz Global Investors, Prudential Financial Securities Investment Trust Enterprise, Nomura Asset Management, Cathay Securities Investment Trust, Uni-President Asset Management, Fuh Hwa Securities Trust Co and Fubon Asset Management.

Source: Bureau of Labor Funds

THAILAND 

Srikanya Yathip, GPF

Thailand's Government Pension Fund will from next year focus its investments on Asian and emerging markets as they tend to quickly recover from adversity such as the Covid-19 outbreak, GPF secretary-general Srikanya Yathip said.

She also voiced confidence that total investment returns next year would be higher than this year. Returns this year are also expected to be positive thanks to GPF’s adjustment of its investment strategy, under which it boosted its investment ceiling in foreign markets to 40% from 30%. Foreign assets currently account for 32% of the total portfolio.

In response to members’ concerns about the impact of the outbreak on GPF's investments, the fund is offering them eight investment options. The fund has 1.1 million members and its investment portfolio is about Bt1 trillion ($32.9 billion).

Source: The Star

Post Covid, GPF is eyeing distressed investments in Thailand's tourism and hotel industry and to add more technology and Chinese assets, said Man Juttijudata, the state fund's chief investment strategy officer.

"Thailand's economy depends to a large extent on tourists and hotels. This is another chance to acquire distressed assets in the next year or so," he said, quoted in Omfif's Global Public Pensions 2020 report.

Man added: "Our fund managers are always looking to add Chinese assets, especially Chinese tech stocks. They think that China will repeat the US's development trajectory."

Source: Omfif