SHAH ALAM (March 1): The Employees Provident Fund’s (EPF) foreign investments continued to outperform its domestic investments in generating returns last year.

Foreign investments, despite only comprising 37% of the provident fund’s RM1.25 trillion assets under management (AUM) as at end-December 2024, generated RM37.44 billion or 50.3% of total investment income.

Meanwhile, domestic investments — comprising 63% of AUM — contributed RM37.02 billion or 49.7% of total investment income.

While the shares of income contribution were equal, the smaller asset base of the EPF's foreign investments indicated that they outperformed their domestic counterpart.

Going forward, the provident fund will be guided by its new Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) for 2025 to 2027, which has been approved by its investment panel and the Ministry of Finance, according to EPF chief executive officer Ahmad Zulqarnain Onn during a briefing here on Saturday.

The new SAA leaves the overseas-domestic split in new investment deployment unchanged, he noted.

“There will not be a change, not a reduction, but the idea is that we keep it stable over the next few years,” he said.

“In terms of the mathematics, it means that 70% to 80% of new money will be deployed domestically."

In 2024, the EPF deployed RM96.8 billion in new investments. Of this, 82% were invested domestically, while the remaining 18% went overseas.

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