As Saudi Arabia’s holdings of US Treasury bonds rose to more than USD119.2 billion in June, registering an increase of USD4.5 billion from May, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) revealed moves to seize opportunities and diversify investments in order to acquire 6.5 million shares in the US market, distributed among three major companies.
With these deals, the value of the Saudi PIF portfolio in the US market would reach about USD40.8 billion by the end of the second quarter of 2022.
PIF has succeeded in investing through 17 new companies in the US market during the second quarter of this year, including JP Morgan Chase & Co, BlackRock, Amazon and Microsoft.
PIF acquired 213,000 class A shares in Alphabet, 4.7 million class A shares in Zoom and 1.8 million shares in Microsoft, a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed. It also acquired shares in JPMorgan and BlackRock, buying 3.9 million shares and 741,693 shares respectively.
Reuters reported that the fund bought 6.3 million shares in Starbucks, and added other stocks including Adobe Systems, Advanced Micro Devices, Salesforce, Home Depot, Costco, Freeport-McMoRan, Datadog, and NextEra Energy.
The Fund also announced during the LEAP tech conference, which was recently held in Saudi Arabia, a partnership of two billion dollars with a subsidiary company of Alibaba. The size of the technology and digital market in the Kingdom has reached around USD40 billion.
Meanwhile, Saudi holdings of US Treasuries rose to USD119.2 billion in June from USD114.7 billion in May, according to data released by the US Treasury.
Overall, Saudi Arabia’s long-term bond investments in the US Treasuries accounted for 86 percent or USD102.02 billion, while short-term paper accounted for USD17.1 billion or 14 percent.