He says online lingerie company in India could still turn a profit in near future.
Former Khazanah Nasional managing director Azman Mokhtar says the fundamentals of the investment should be looked at carefully.
PETALING JAYA: Former Khazanah Nasional managing director Azman Mokhtar says the RM80 million investment in Zivame, an online lingerie company in India, is recoverable in the medium term.
In his farewell note to Khazanah staff, Azman said the sovereign wealth fund invested US$19 mil (RM80 million) for a 22% stake in the company.
Azman said the fundamentals of the investments should be looked at carefully, pointing out that India is a market of one billion people, half of whom are women and that incomes were rising there.
“Zivame remains a going concern and in fact has just had its best-ever quarter and we remain quietly confident that we will be able over the medium term to recover all or almost all of what we have provided for.
“”In any case, again, as with all our overall investment assessment we need to look at things in perspective in that the same risk-taking in India for the consumer sector in companies ranging from the sale of paints for houses to jewellery, under what we call Project Billion have generated more than RM1bil realised and unrealised gains to date,” he said following his resignation on July 26 from Khazanah.
He said that they had made more than RM6 bil in gains from investing in online e-commerce company Alibaba.
As for the investment in UBS, through investment company Olivant in 2008, which also caused losses of RM1.7 bil, Azman said that such losses are not exceptional.
Azman said that overall, Khazanah achieved net gains of RM82 bil over a nine-year period from 2008 to 2017.
He said in investment terms, their gains have outnumbered their losses by 5 to 1.
Prime Minister Najib Razak said Khazanah had performed well by raising its assets from RM33 bil to RM134.5 bil when he was prime minister.
Najib said that losses in investments could not be avoided. - FMT
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