THE country’s US$941 billion sovereign wealth fund shifted more than 60 percent of one of its largest actively managed equity portfolios to passive strategies after its long-time manager Susan Gao left, Bloomberg News quoted sources as saying yesterday.

China Investment Corp. (CIC) has transferred most of the more than US$10 billion in the Global Large Cap Value Equity Portfolio to funds tracking indexes, the report said. The remaining portfolio has newly promoted managers running fundamental large-cap and digital-economy stocks, it said.

Gao built CIC’s proprietary equity team from scratch over the last decade, during which her funds consistently beat the benchmark MSCI ACWI Index, sources familiar said earlier. She joins a slew of departures from CIC at a time when the fund is looking to invest in more resilient assets following the virus-induced volatility of the first quarter.

Gao resigned in April for personal reasons, joining Wallace Yu, who left the same month after leading the multi-asset team.

Gao’s portfolio ranked in the top quartile among global peers, according to the CIC. She beat the benchmark by 19 percentage points since its independent accounting started in April 2013 through the end of 2016, according to an internal book compiled by CIC in 2017 to mark the company’s 10-year anniversary.

CIC is fine-tuning strategies this year amid the turmoil, looking for “more resilient” assets to boost long-term results, executive vice president Zhao Haiying said in an interview in May. The fund’s overseas investments returned about 17 percent last year based on unaudited results, she said, as global stocks rallied.(SD-Agencies)