LONDON: Mubadala has reported a fourfold rise in total comprehensive income to 53 billion dirhams ($14.4 billion) for 2019 in what its CEO hailed as a “milestone benchmark year” for the Abu Dhabi government investment group.
In a video message to investors, CEO Khaldoon Khalifa Al-Mubarak said that the company’s strong balance sheet and diversified portfolio had put it in a good position to deal with the extraordinary impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The results were the best results as a whole, for the whole group, that we have ever achieved,” he said.
Mubadala said it invested 68 billion dirhams over the year in sectors ranging from credit to technology, life sciences, health care, renewables, transportation and agribusiness.
Gulf economies are struggling to cope with the impact of the twin blow of the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of oil prices which has led to thousands of job losses across the region as commercial activity ground to a near halt.
This has complicated both the global and regional investment landscape for sovereign investment groups such as Mubadala.
“All of this happened in essentially a period of 60 to 90 days,” said Al-Mubarak. “The onus on us right now is to take the right decisions, before even talking about investments, before talking about where the world is going, our primary focus was to use all our facilities here in the UAE to support the community, the country and this fight against COVID.”
Mubadala said it generated some 63 billion dirhams from its mature assets and distributions from investments last year.
Assets under management stood at 853 billion dirhams at the end of the year, compared to 840 billion dirhams in 2018.
Mubadala’s investment portfolio spans 50 countries in both emerging and developed markets with 43 percent of it focused on private equity. A further 21 percent is in public markets and 11 percent in real estate and infrastructure.
Among its regional investments are two new MENA technology funds that will deploy $250 million in tech start-ups in the Middle East.