Temasek EMEA to seek big deals, ditch smaller holdings

The US, Europe and India will be the unit’s three largest investment destinations

Temasek Holdings Pte will largely avoid making smaller deals in Europe as it looks to manage fewer positions in a challenging era for investing, according to its regional head Nagi Hamiyeh.

The Europe, Middle East and Africa arm of the Singapore state-owned investor will favor a “sweet spot” of transactions ranging from around €500 million to €1 billion ($590 million to $1.2 billion), Hamiyeh said in an interview in Paris.

Hamiyeh was recently appointed to lead Temasek Global Investments, which managed S$155 billion ($121 billion) in assets as of March, around 36% of the firm’s portfolio. The new entity will start operations on April 1 as part of a broader reorganization.

Temasek has already begun selling smaller assets that “take a lot of bandwidth,” said Hamiyeh, adding there may be a small number of exceptions in technology. “Anything where our cost is less than €200 million, we’re not interested in; over time we will sell.” At the same time, he said deals worth several billions of dollars would “create a lot of headaches for us.”

A spokesperson later clarified this applied only to Temasek’s EMEA investments.

Hamiyeh, who will concurrently remain Temasek’s EMEA head, said it had already identified 22 small “long-tail” assets and sold eight of them since last year.

Temasek Global Investments is one of three new entities announced last month as part of the overhaul, as the firm attempts to streamline operations and improve results. Temasek has regularly been noted as one of the 10 most active sovereign wealth funds in the world by consultancy firm Global SWF, though the firm does not classify itself as one.

Holdings that will sit within Hamiyeh’s purview run the gamut from Indian hospital operator Manipal Health Enterprises to US investment giant BlackRock Inc. and China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd.

The US, Europe and India will be the unit’s three largest investment destinations. In Europe, more than S$10 billion has already been deployed of the planned S$25 billion that Hamiyeh last year predicted would be invested in the region over five years.

“We’re still investing in China, but we’re not going to invest at the pace we used to invest before,” he said, referring to Global Direct Investments — a Temasek label that doesn’t include its Singapore-based portfolio companies. “The US is the deepest market in terms of opportunities in terms of capital markets, then it’s Europe.”

He reiterated that working with family businesses in Europe was its top priority there. Despite the luxury downturn affecting high-end brands around the world, Hamiyeh remains keen on backing such firms — highlighting its recent deal to build a 10% stake in Italian fashion house Zegna Group, valued at about $220 million.

The Zegna deal announced in late July “took me one year of discussion with the patriarch of the family,” he said.

On the public side, it has a wish list of 15 European companies across luxury, consumer, life sciences, energy, financial services and logistics. “There is a financial model built for all of these and every day we go back and check: is it at a dislocated price that allows us to go in or not?”

Temasek is also keen to find new sporting properties to buy into, with Hamiyeh naming CVC Capital Partners’ investment in Formula 1 as “a great deal” while highlighting that some investors “made killings” in cricket in India. In July, it said that it was an investor in music royalties via Stockholm-based Pophouse, founded by ABBA star Bjorn Ulvaeus.

Returns Trail

Temasek’s net portfolio value grew to hit a record high in its latest fiscal year, but its 10-year total shareholder return of 5% — a compounded and annualized measure that includes dividends — underperformed the MSCI World Index, which returned an annualized 10% in the decade through March 2025.

Under the reorganization, Hamiyeh — who spent several years helping to drive consolidation and value generation between Temasek’s Singaporean companies before moving to Paris — is set to become one of its key leaders. Temasek Chief Executive Officer Dilhan Pillay reportedly said part of the rationale for the restructure was to “test the next generation and prepare them to take leadership of the company.”

Hamiyeh said the portfolio outside of Singapore would be more dynamic and should grow faster than investments in the city-state. Its Paris office will increase from 15 staff today to around 20 in the coming months, with some moving from Temasek’s London office and other locations.

“The portfolio in Singapore being a very mature portfolio will grow technically less fast over a longer period of time than what we’re doing on this side,” Hamiyeh said.

Speaking about the firm’s plans for its Singapore-based portfolio holdings, he said: “Every now and then, we would revisit with the boards of the companies areas where does it make sense to be ‘bigger is better’ and then we streamline and we take the best of both companies.”

As part of the reorganization, Temasek’s domestic portfolio companies will be largely placed in a unit named Temasek Singapore under the leadership of its Chief Financial Officer Png Chin Yee. They made up about 41% of the firm’s net portfolio value as of March.

(Updates with Temasek Singapore in the last paragraph. An earlier version was corrected to clarify where Hamiyeh was referring to the EMEA unit.)