National Pension Service Tesla Early Investment... 6.5-Year Return Rate Over 1000%

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[Asia Economy Reporter Park So-yeon] It has attracted attention that the National Pension Service (NPS) has invested a significant amount in Tesla stock for several years and is estimated to have earned evaluation gains worth trillions of won from the stock, which has surged in recent years.

According to the stock holdings report (Form 13F) submitted by the NPS to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the 14th, the NPS disclosed that it held Tesla shares worth $7.92 million (approximately 8.8 billion KRW) as of the end of the third quarter of 2014.

As of the end of the third quarter of 2014, Tesla’s stock price was $48.54 (adjusted price). Applying the stock split in August last year and the current stock price as of February 13 ($813.32), the return over six and a half years approaches a staggering 1576%.

Considering that one share was split into five shares, the value of one Tesla share, currently priced in the $800 range, was only $9.71 at the end of the third quarter of 2014.

Since the NPS’s SEC filing data began to be disclosed starting from the third quarter of 2014, which does not necessarily indicate the initial purchase time, it is estimated that the NPS started acquiring Tesla shares even earlier than this.

The overall scale of the NPS’s investment in Tesla is more specifically revealed in the overseas stock investment status data by individual stocks, which the Fund Management Headquarters began disclosing from 2016.

The SEC disclosure data only shows the status of unlisted U.S. stocks directly held under the NPS’s name, so there are limitations in grasping the entire portfolio of the NPS.

According to the Fund Management Headquarters data, the NPS held Tesla shares worth 182.4 billion KRW as of the end of 2016.

The holding rank was 76th among overseas stocks, which was a relatively large investment considering Tesla’s market capitalization at the time ($34.4 billion). For comparison, another automobile manufacturer GM, with a similar investment proportion (74th), had a market capitalization of $52.7 billion, far exceeding Tesla’s.

This is interpreted as a result of an active management decision that placed a high weighting on Tesla’s growth potential.

The NPS’s Tesla shareholding ratio was steadily maintained at around 0.42?0.44% from 2016 to 2019. Assuming the shareholding ratio remained at 0.42% as of the end of 2019 until recently, the current estimated valuation of Tesla shares held by the NPS would reach approximately 3.6 trillion KRW. This suggests an evaluation gain of over 3 trillion KRW.

Although it does not match Tesla’s rate of return, the NPS was an early investor holding large amounts of major large-cap tech stocks such as Microsoft (1st in holding proportion, 927.7 billion KRW), Apple (2nd, 901 billion KRW), and Amazon (3rd, 678.6 billion KRW) as of the end of 2016.

In recent years, the stock prices of these companies have surged sharply, and with the NPS steadily increasing its shareholding through additional investments, the valuation as of the end of 2019 rose to 3.3304 trillion KRW for Microsoft, 3.1406 trillion KRW for Apple, and 1.9913 trillion KRW for Amazon.

Reflecting this, the NPS’s overseas stock investment performance has significantly outpaced its domestic stock performance.

Since the fund’s establishment in 1988 through 2019, the annual average return on overseas stocks was about 10.08%. In contrast, the annual average return on domestic stocks during the same period was 5.59%.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.