In 2023, global markets experienced significant turbulence across various sectors and industries, driven primarily by inflationary pressures, rising interest rates, geopolitical tensions, and supply chain disruptions. Despite these challenges, our multi-year portfolio returns continued to outperform their respective benchmarks.
Our Assets Under Management (AUM) across the group grew to AED 1.1 trillion, up from AED 1.0 trillion in 2022, and our five-year rate of return stood at 10.3 percent, up from 8.5 percent in 2022. These results reflect how our evolved strategy is paying off as we expected.
Against the backdrop of global market volatility, we continued to seek value by investing selectively across diverse sectors, and regions of the world with strong growth potential, particularly in Asia, where over 20 percent of our deployments were focused. We also continued our investment focus in North America, which represents our largest market by AUM.
In line with our investment strategy, we executed investments totalling AED 89 billion in key sectors such as Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Life Sciences, Clean Energy, Infrastructure, Private Credit, amongst other sectors that are shaping the future. Notwithstanding the market challenges, we capitalized on opportunities to monetize select investments, in line with our monetization and capital recycling strategy. Although the monetization rate was lower compared to previous years, we successfully generated total proceeds of AED 99 billion for the year.
Select examples of notable transactions include:
- Launch of M42, a first-of-its-kind, tech-enabled, integrated healthcare company created through the coming together of G42 Healthcare and Mubadala Health
- Additional investment in CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent Full Fibre platform and only carrier-neutral operator
- Monetization of our legacy Petroleum & Petrochemicals holding in OMV
- Monetization of our holding in UniCredit
- Monetization of our holding in Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB)
Our Credit Investments unit continued its strong performance, witnessing a notable increase in AUM, driven by the establishment of new and additional strategic partnerships to further bolster our global presence in the Private Credit business.
Complementary to our growth in AUM, 2023 marked a prudent year of debt raising where we successfully executed almost AED 30 billion of funding commitments obtained across a diverse range of products, that were strategically issued to refinance maturing debt, and to also support Mubadala’s investment activities in line with our exciting growth plans. We successfully executed our inaugural Green Bond in October following the establishment of our Green Financing framework to commemorate Mubadala’s decision to align with the UAE’s commitment to Net-Zero by 2050, during COP28. Despite the record debt raising, we continue to maintain a relatively interest rate immune debt portfolio with a conservative gearing ratio of 10.3 percent and a strong liquidity position to navigate through this cycle.
While the dynamic global landscape may present unforeseen challenges, the experience, expertise and talent of our team will remain key to delivering on our strategy and mandate to generate long term sustainable financial returns.
