I'm Manveen Rana here at Davos, and I'm joined by Tawfik from BCG.
Welcome.
Nice to see you.
Have you had a good Davos so far?
Yeah, it's been great.
I mean, it's, you know, there's always a very intense few days
and it's been incredibly productive.
You know, you always meet interesting people with
interesting ideas.
And I think this year was no different. In particular, in my
world of the private capital world and investors, there's a
lot of things happening after a decade of low interest rates.
And you know the theme is really around how do we make money going forward as investors?
What are you hearing from people?
We heard quite a few things.
I mean, you know, let me maybe decompose it.
One is around the consolidation of the industry.
Many of the, you know the players have decided that they
need more scale, they need a bigger balance sheet, and
therefore you see quite a few mergers or acquisitions. You saw
recently BlackRock buying GIP.
You also see a theme of going public.
Many of the alternative asset managers in particular, for the
same reasons that we just discussed, have decided to go public
You know it's well known that CVC has an IPO coming, rumors
that General Atlantic has filed in the U.S., and so we'll see a
lot more public companies on the investor side.
So these are more the general partners, the GPs on the
providers of capital.
We see really the emergence of very large pools of capital, in
particular in the Middle East, where capital formation has been
incredible in the last decade, and they're very important
players of the financial ecosystem, now investing in
infrastructure and private equity, in growth and venture,
and you know they provide a lot of the capital that fuels the
world's economy right now.
We are starting this Davos at a time of huge instability though.
So I mean what are your predictions for investment trends
over the rest of 2024? Right,
well you know it's always hard to make predictions and you
often, you know turn out to be wrong.
So maybe more, I leave with an optimistic feeling that I think
the world's economy has proven incredibly resilient.
I mean, just in the last couple of years, you know, we had a war
in Europe, we had a global pandemic.
We have a war in the Middle East, we have geopolitical
tensions in North Asia.
And yet, the world's economy continues to hum along.
And I think there's a lot of capital in the world and that
capital is going to get deployed.
It's quite a bit tougher than it was, say, five years ago to
generate the returns that people are expecting.
But I really remain quite optimistic. The promise of AI,
you've seen that AI is all over Davos this week.
I think that's a massive technology revolution that's
going to, you know, impact the 100 billion, sorry, $100
trillion or so of the world's economy.
And so there's a lot more opportunities than challenges in my view.
And are you hearing that sort of optimism from the people?
Yeah,
Davos tends to be a little bit more of a pessimistic crowd in a
way of like the world is broken and, you know, this is what
needs to get done.
And I find that this week was actually much more on the
optimistic side where people want to rebuild trust, people
want to find solutions to climate and sustainability, to
technology, to inequality.
And so it was a very optimistic week.
That really is an unusual Davos.
Yeah, maybe we're getting better at looking at the bright side of things.
Let's hope so.
Well Tawfik, thanks very much for joining us to to tell us
what's been happening here.
Pleasure seeing you.