Temasek Holdings Loses 31 Percent of Portfolio
HONG KONG -- Temasek Holdings, the Singapore government’ssovereign wealth fund, said Tuesday the value of its investment portfolio fell by 31 percent of its total, or about $39 billion, between March and November last year, a reflection of the stock market rout set off by the turmoil surrounding U.S. subprime mortgages.
Temasek’s portfolio was worth 127 billion Singapore dollars, or $85 billion, at the end of November, down 31 percent from the end of March. Lim Hwee Hua, senior minister of state with the Finance Ministry, confirmed the figures to Parliament on Tuesday, news agencies reported.
The decline was broadly in line with the performance of the world’s stock markets last year -- the MSCI World Index fell 38 percent over the same period in U.S. dollar terms, Bloomberg News said.
Temasek, which has a wide-ranging portfolio spanning financial services, telecoms, media, infrastructure and other sectors, is nursing losses from high-profile investments that it made in Merrill Lynch and Barclays as it aggressively expanded outside its core Asian market.
Its $5.9 billion investment in Merrill Lynch alone resulted in a loss of more than $2 billion, as the shares plunged before the stock was delisted following the Bank of Americapurchase.
Temasek controls some of Singapore’s high-profile companies, including Singapore Airlines and Singapore Telecommunications, and has stakes in global companies likeStandard Chartered.
Last week, Temasek announced that its chief executive, Ho Ching, would step down and would be replaced by Charles Goodyear, the former chief executive of BHP Billiton, on Oct. 1.
S. Dhanabalan, Temasek’s chairman, said that the decision by Ms. Ho, who drove the state fund’s expansion outside Singapore with acquisitions in China, Europe and the United States, to step down was not linked to performance and that it was too early to determine whether investments made in the last two years will lose out in the long term.
Ms. Ho is married to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
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