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Excerpts of Q&A with Khazanah Nasional managing director

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Azman Mokhtar, managing director of Khazanah Nasional, at his office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo: Thomas Yau
Excerpts from the South China Morning Post’s interview with Khazanah Nasional managing director, Tan Sri Azman Mokhtar.

How important are technology investments when it comes to Khazanah’s portfolio?

Technology and innovation is a very important part of our portfolio. If you take a narrow view of how many tech companies we have, percentage wise it may not seem big, although we have big names in our portfolio including Alibaba, and companies like Palantir, probably one of the world’s largest big data analytics companies.

[Our portfolio] includes emerging companies – one deal that we’ve went in, and out [was] Skyscanner. We also invest into funds, which invest in famous names, whether it’s Uber or Airbnb.

The idea of pivoting in technology investment is very important, because technology moves so fast.

There’s a company called Blippar [that we’ve invested in], based in London. What they do is a visual search engine – they want to be the Google of visual search, with technology like facial recognition, image recognition.

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