WEBVTT

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I'm Manveen Rana here at Davos,
and I'm joined by Tawfik from BCG.

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Welcome.

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Nice to see you.

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Have you had a good Davos so far?

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Yeah, it's been great.

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I mean, it's, you know, there's
always a very intense few days

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and it's been incredibly
productive.

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You know, you always meet
interesting people with

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interesting ideas.

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And I think this year was no
different. In particular, in my

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world of the private capital
world and investors, there's a

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lot of things happening after a
decade of low interest rates.

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And you know the theme is really around
how do we make money going forward as investors?

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What are  you hearing from people?

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We heard quite a few things.

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I mean, you know, let me maybe
decompose it.

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One is around the consolidation
of the industry.

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Many of the, you know the
players have decided that they

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need more scale, they need a
bigger balance sheet, and

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therefore you see quite a few
mergers or acquisitions. You saw

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recently BlackRock buying GIP.

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You also see a theme of going public.

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Many of the alternative asset
managers in particular, for the

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same reasons that we just
discussed, have decided to go public

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You know it's well known that
CVC has an IPO coming, rumors

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that General Atlantic has filed
in the U.S., and so we'll see a

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lot more public companies on the
investor side.

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So these are more the general
partners, the GPs on the

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providers of capital.

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We see really the emergence of
very large pools of capital, in

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particular in the Middle East,
where capital formation has been

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incredible in the last decade,
and they're very important

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players of the financial
ecosystem, now investing in

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infrastructure and private
equity, in growth and venture,

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and you know they provide a lot
of the capital that fuels the

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world's economy right now.

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We are starting this Davos at a
time of huge instability though.

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So I mean what are your
predictions for investment trends

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over the rest of 2024?
Right,

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well you know it's always hard
to make predictions and you

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often, you know turn out to be wrong.

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So maybe more, I leave with an
optimistic feeling that I think

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the world's economy has proven
incredibly resilient.

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I mean, just in the last couple
of years, you know, we had a war

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in Europe, we had a global
pandemic.

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We have a war in the Middle
East, we have geopolitical

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tensions in North Asia.

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And yet, the world's economy
continues to hum along.

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And I think there's a lot of
capital in the world and that

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capital is going to get
deployed.

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It's quite a bit tougher than it
was, say, five years ago to

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generate the returns that people
are expecting.

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But I really remain quite
optimistic. The promise of AI,

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you've seen that AI is all over
Davos this week.

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I think that's a massive
technology revolution that's

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going to, you know, impact the
100 billion, sorry, $100

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trillion or so of the world's
economy.

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And so there's a lot more
opportunities than challenges in my view.

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And are you hearing that sort of
optimism from the people?

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Yeah,

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Davos tends to be a little bit
more of a pessimistic crowd in a

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way of like the world is broken
and, you know, this is what

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needs to get done.

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And I find that this week was
actually much more on the

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optimistic side where people
want to rebuild trust, people

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want to find solutions to
climate and sustainability, to

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technology, to inequality.

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And so it was a very optimistic week.

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That really is an unusual Davos.

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Yeah, maybe we're getting better
at looking at the bright side of things.

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Let's hope so.

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Well Tawfik, thanks very much
for joining us to to tell us

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what's been happening here.

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Pleasure seeing you.