Singapore's Temasek opens San Francisco office
Singapore’s Temasek Holdings has opened an office in San Francisco, expanding its US presence following the establishment of a New York office in 2014.
The San Francisco base will serve as an outpost for cultivating relationships and looking at deals within the Bay Area – especially in Silicon Valley – and beyond. It comes at a time when the government-backed investment fund is seeing increasing investment opportunities in areas such as technology, healthcare, life sciences and agriculture.
It will complement Temasek's existing offices in New York, Mexico City and San Paulo in Brazil to cover both North and Latin America.
“Many companies we look at here in the US are developing products and services that cater to users beyond the domestic market. They play to the changes in demographics in places like Asia and Latin America. We see a continuing focus on sectors that are a natural complement to what this region does well – technology, life sciences, and particularly, the congruence of the two," Lim Boon Heng, chairman of Temasek, said in a statement.
Temasek's portoflio was worth S$242 billion ($180 billion) as of March 2016, with US-based investments accounting for about 10% of this. The include life sciences research company Verily Life Sciences, agricultural technology firm VoloAgri, online personal finance platform SoFi, and online vacation home rental marketplace Airbnb.
Technology, media and telecom (TMT) became the fund's largest sector, accounting for 25% of the portfolio. TMT exposure is largely driven by ownership of Singapore Telecommunications, but the technology and media share alone stands at S$14 billion, up from just S$3 billion in 2011.
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