Norway Made $184 Billion In First Half, With Help From Nvidia And Apple
A tiny nation of 5.7 million people quietly became the world's largest single investor, owning a slice of nearly every major company on earth. The secret behind Norway's staggering financial empire starts with oil and ends somewhere far more surprising.
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Should Norway have a lot of money, as a nation? How and why? The nation has only 5.7 million people. And its GDP is only $500 billion. These are tiny compared to most other nations. However, it has a sovereign wealth fund which is worth $2 trillion. The yield from the money was $184 billion in the first half.
Its wealth fund is worth more than any OPEC nation. It is also larger than China’s.
Norway’s money comes from North Sea oil holdings. These are mostly in the Ekofisk, Statfjord, Troll, and Johan Sverdrup fields. Norway produces two million barrels of oil per day from these fields. And, according to Reuters, it has spread the risk of this capital widely across the world’s public companies. “Investing the Norwegian state’s revenues from oil and gas production, the fund owns on average 1.5% of all listed companies globally, making it the world’s largest single investor,” the news service reports.
Among the sovereign wealth fund’s money are relatively large positions in the world’s megacap tech firms. It holds a 1.28% stake worth $62 billion in Nvidia, (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction), a 1.24% stake worth $52 billion in Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), a 1.17% stake worth $50 billion in Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG), a 1.27% stake worth $35 billion in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and a 1.7% stake worth $34 billion in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Sovereign wealth funds, in general, hold massive positions in publicly traded companies. Yet, investors rarely, if ever, hear comments or criticisms about these positions. It is not entirely clear why the sovereign money remains passive.
Sovereign wealth fund positions are often larger than those of America’s largest money managers. These include Vanguard, BlackRock, and Fidelity. These institutions are, on occasion, very vocal. However, they represent millions of individual and institutional investors. Sovereign wealth funds only have one–their own governments.
Is $184 billion a good return on $2 trillion? Certainly not on a percentage basis. However, Norway does need outside returns. The dollar sum of the return is too staggering.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
