The head of Mubadala Investment Co. said he was turning his sights to fast-growing Asian economies for the Abu Dhabi wealth fund’s long-term investment planning.
“If I look at the next 10, 20 years, where we see growth, it’s also coming in Asia, it’s in India, it’s in South-East Asia,” Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, chief executive officer of the $276 billion fund, said at the Milken Institute’s Middle East and Africa Summit in Abu Dhabi. “It’s in big economies, with big populations, that are growing, and that we didn’t have as much of a focus on in the last 10 years.”
He stressed that the US will remain “an unbelievably attractive market and a key market. But we’re focusing east, and we’re spending a lot of time building that capability.”
Mubadala, which has offices spanning from San Francisco to Beijing, is among funds from the oil-rich Gulf region that continue to pursue acquisitions even as global volumes fall and banks scale back lending. Their activity in the US is facing greater scrutiny from the Biden administration, part of a broader pushback on entities perceived to have close ties with China, Bloomberg News reported last month.
Earlier on Thursday, Mubadala’s deputy group chief executive officer Waleed Al Muhairi said the fund sees the US as “still the best destination for capital.”
First Published: Dec 8, 2023 4:54 AM IST
