Qatar looks to China for more investments

The $62 billion Qatar Investment Authority (QIA)Â could access a greater range of investments in China if its government executes plans to set up an investment promotion office in Beijing in 2010.



The Qatar Investment Promotion Department, a government unit aiming to attract corporate and private investors to its economy, plans to establish a Beijing office to catalyse and manage investment flows between Qatar and China.

Speaking to China Daily, Farzam Kamalabadi, president of Future Trends International (FTI), said the Qatari Government office would help the country’s institutional investors, such as the QIA, to pursue opportunities in the banking, real estate, infrastructure, chemical and water treatment industries in China.

Kamalabadi, a former senior advisor to the national oil industries of Oman, Iran, Kuwait and China, spoke to the Chinese newspaper during the Global Think Tank Summit in Beijing earlier this month.

The US-headquartered FTI is a group of companies focusing on China’s oil, gas and energy industries, including funds and investments related to these sectors, but also operates in other regions and industries.

Sponsored Content

The group has run energy industry operations in the Middle East and China, and also runs commodities investment funds. Citing this experience, it pitches itself as a capable advisor for government and businesses setting up or expanding their operations in China.

It vendors the China AME Energy Fund, a partnership between FTI, Arch Group and financial Partners Bank, which makes medium-term equity investments in mid-market energy, oil and gas companies in China, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region.

FTI is also setting up a China Real Estate Fund and China Clean Energy Fund.

Leave a Comment

Sort content by

Why integrated reporting makes sense: Robert Eccles

Robert Eccles has been trying to change the nature of corporate reporting for more than 20 years. He has been an advocate for supplementing financials with information on non-financial factors that are leading indicators of financial results – such as product development, customer satisfaction and the development of intangible assets. The premise is those companies

Opportunities in Europe

Investors and academics agree that political developments in Greece are important because they may shape how financial markets will respond to future political situations in the Eurozone. But according to Olivier Rousseau, the executive director of the FFR, the French pension reserve fund, there is more hype outside of the Eurozone on the implications of

More evidence big is better in pension funds

A pension fund that has 10 times more assets under management has on average 7.67 basis points lower annual investment costs according to a working paper from authors at De Nederlansche Bank, that explores the relationship between pension fund size and investment costs. Written by Dirk Broeders, Arco van Oord and David Rijsbergen the paper

European investment plan requires public private collaboration

The two largest institutional investors in the Netherlands, PGGM and APG, have responded to the European Commission’s investment plan, urging the commission to call on institutional investors to collaborate on the investment proposal. However they also warn that institutional investors are not just a “subsidising entity” and the Juncker Plan is best executed as a

Why Andrew Ang joined Blackrock

Andrew Ang believes factor investing is a more efficient way to organise a portfolio as it allows liquid and illiquid strategies to be managed across the portfolio. It also has the added benefit of honing managers on value creation. He’s been working with a handful of investors while Professor of Finance at Columbia University on

The power of engagement

It is called the “CalPERS’ Effect” but it could easily be called the asset owner effect, or the institutional investor effect, or the power of engagement effect. Wilshire, which is a consultant to the $300 billion Californian fund CalPERS, has provided an update on its study measuring the effect of engagement on a targeted list of companies called the Focus List.

Previous