Saudi Arabia's PIF tops up stakes in US stocks with $7.6bn of new investments

The Public Investment Fund snapped up positions in Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Zoom, JP Morgan Chase and BlackRock, among others

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has bought new stakes in technology, retail and finance companies. AP

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund increased its investment in US equities in the second quarter, pouring money into technology, e-commerce, retail and finance companies.

The Public Investment Fund invested about $7.6 billion to snap up new stakes in 17 companies, a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday showed. The value of the fund's total investments in US equities in the second quarter was about $41bn.

The PIF, which manages more than $620bn in assets, invested $464 million in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, about $474m in Microsoft and $507m in the videoconferencing company Zoom.

The fund invested nearly $434m in JP Morgan Chase, the largest US bank, and about $452m in BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager.

It also invested $482m in Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee house chain, $497m in Costco Wholesale Corporation, the third biggest retailer globally, $432m in Amazon, the biggest online e-commerce marketplace, and $450m in Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the US.

The fund also invested $373m in Booking Holdings, an American travel technology company that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines, including Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com and Cheapflights, among others.

The sovereign wealth fund lies at the centre of the kingdom's Vision 2030 plan to diversify the Arab world's largest economy and reduce its reliance on oil. Under a five-year strategy announced last year, the PIF aims to more than double the value of its assets under management to $1.07 trillion and to commit $40bn annually to develop Saudi Arabia's economy until 2025.

The fund has created 10 new sectors, set up more than 30 new companies, created 331,000 jobs in Saudi Arabia and more than tripled its assets in the past few years. Under its five-year plan, it will focus on 13 sectors as part of its core domestic strategy.

Other second-quarter investments include the software company Adobe, Advanced Micro Devices, a semiconductor company that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets, Datadog, a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, and Salesforce, a cloud-computing platform.

Other notable investments by the fund include Freeport-McMoRan, a mining company that is the world's largest producer of molybdenum, a major copper producer and operates the biggest gold mine globally in Papua, Indonesia.

The fund retained its share position in MultiPlan Corporation, a healthcare management software company, with the value increasing by 17 per cent in the second quarter to $281m. The value of the investment in Air Products and Chemicals, which sells gases and chemicals for industrial uses, surged 255 per cent to about $646m.

The value of the fund's stake in game developer Electronic Arts increased by 8 per cent to $1.95bn.

The PIF's US equity portfolio includes 53 companies, as of the second quarter.