The Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) is waiting for a further expected decline in global markets before deploying investments and believes that will be by the end of the year, Managing Director Ghanem al-Ghenaiman said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum organized by Bloomberg in Doha, Ghenaiman said he believes markets will “go down further from here.”
He pointed out that the world's central banks are concerned about inflation rates, adding that they have been striving to reassure the markets to avoid any recession.
He further affirmed that the KIA sovereign wealth fund is currently focusing on infrastructure projects in the United States, and the transportation sector in Europe and Asia.
It has more than $700 billion in assets, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute.
It manages two funds -- one is a nest egg for when oil prices run out, the other is used to cover Kuwait’s budget deficit.
Separately, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) Chief Sheikh Nawaf Saud al-Sabah said on Tuesday the Gulf oil producer had the capacity to reach its Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quota and any future increases.
“We are making the investments necessary to ensure that we can meet any new increases in terms of allocations and also in terms of demand,” Sheikh Nawaf said on the sidelines of the Qatar Economic Forum.
Kuwait received its first offshore rig a week ago and it will be ready to begin drilling soon, he said without giving a precise timescale.
On Kuwait’s new 615,000 bpd refinery, Sheikh Nawaf said he expected it to reach full capacity around the end of the year.
“We’ve already worked in the commissioning stages. The hydrocarbons are in the system. It’s a hot site now,” he said.
There are no plans to list units of KPC for now, but already monetizing pipelines is a possibility.
“We looked at what Aramco and ADNOC have done, in terms of pipelines for example. It’s not something that’s completely off the table for us, it’s something that we’re looking at,” he stressed.
