The National Pension Service (NPS) announced that it sold the HSBC headquarters building, located in Canary Wharf, London, on Dec. 5 to the Qatar Investment Authority, and made a profit of 960 billion won (US$877 million).
The NPS purchased the 45-story and 12-year-old building from HSBC at a cost of approximately 1.5 trillion won (US$1.37 billion) five years ago and took about 90 billion won (US$82.3 million) in rent a year. The 960 billion won profit is divided into 419 billion won (US$383 million) in dividend income and 541 billion won (US$494 million) in profit on the sale.
In the meantime, the National Pension Fund recorded a cumulative return on investment of 6.08 percent between 1988 and October this year. The gain reached 206.03 trillion won (US$188.40 billion), equivalent to 36.3 percent of the total fund amount. Its overseas investment amount is approximately 97.2 trillion won (US$88.9 billion) as of now.
“The sale of the HSBC building is a nice example of global investment diversification for stable long-term profits and risk management,” said NPS chairman Choi Kwang, adding, “We will continue to increase our overseas investment for the purposes.”