China's pension fund to triple overseas investments

China’s National Social Security Fund (NSSF) intends to triple its overseas investments as part of plans to diversify assets, the Wall Street Journal reported. Having racked up its first losses on the stock market last year, the pension fund wants to keep the equities proportion of its holdings static while simultaneously reducing exposure to fixed-income products and branching out into investments in unlisted companies and offshore private equity. The aim is to boost the proportion of overseas assets to 20% of the total, up from the current level of 7%, said Dai Xianglong, the fund chairman. He didn’t give a timescale for reaching this target. At the end of September, NSSF had US$99.3 billion in assets under management, of which 45% was in fixed-income investments, 30% in domestic and foreign stocks, 20% in private equity and 5% in cash.