When the South Korean national pension service held a reception to celebrate the opening of its office in New York at the end of June, a lot of hedge funds showed up to pay their respects, along with the great and the good of the financial world. The group included Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs, and David Rubenstein, co founder of Carlyle.
The turnout was hardly surprising. The NPS has one of the largest pools of capital in the world with almost $300bn under management and it is rapidly increasing.
NPS has already outgrown its home market. It accounts for over 5 per cent of the stock market in Seoul and 17 per cent of the debt market. “We are a whale in a small pond and that is not good,” Jun Kwang-woo, the NPS chairman and chief executive, told his guests. “We need to invest more outside Korea.”