AMF, Sweden’s second-largest occupational pension fund, this morning reported a 5.7% overall return for the first six months of this year, but said the domestic economy would take a while to recover.

The pension provider for blue-collar workers said in its interim report that total assets rose to SEK846bn (€71.9bn) by the end of June. At the end of last year, AMF managed SEK790bn.

The Stockholm-based pension fund said all asset classes had contributed to a positive total return of 5.7% between January and June.

Tomas Flodén, chief investment officer, said: “The strongest development was the equity part of our portfolio, which grew by 13.6%, in the wake of continued positive development on several important stock exchanges.”

At the end of 2023, AMF had 23% of its traditional portfolio invested in Swedish equities, compared with 16% in foreign equities, according to its annual report.

Flodén said 12 of the 14 equity investment funds offered by AMF’s SEK233bn funds arm, AMF Fonder, had beaten their benchmarks in the first half of the year, as had three of its four fixed-income funds.

Johan Sidenmark, AMF’s chief executive officer, said: “The Swedish economy continued to show positive signals during the first half of the year, even if the political and geopolitical uncertainty remains globally, and the recovery here at home is taking time.”

GDP development in Sweden has been broadly flat since the end of 2021, but was reported at the end of May as having increased by 0.7% in the first quarter 2024, seasonally-adjusted and compared with the previous quarter.

At the Swedish central bank meeting at the end of June, the bank’s senior adviser Mattias Erlandsson told monetary policy setters that domestic economic activity had continued to slow down, despite the higher-than-expected first-quarter national accounts data.

In the second half of this year, he said Sweden’s GDP growth was expected to rise gradually. But he also said recent developments indicated that the Swedish labour market would continue to weaken.

Flodén was last week named as the successor to Sidenmark when the latter leaves AMF in January.

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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