Report from
the CEO

Hi, I am Raphael Arndt and I'm the CEO of the Future Fund, Australia's Sovereign Wealth Fund.

So when I think about FY24, of course we have to always start with the investment performance. That's why we're here. The result this year was really strong, especially considering the changes in the world and how we've positioned the portfolio to be resilient to that.

We really lent into completing our business strategy and positioning ourselves for succeeding in the new investment order. That means that we're getting really good at being a joined-up whole-portfolio investor. We have the technology and data we need to do that well. We're working on our culture to make sure everyone knows their role and we’re thinking strategically in raising the issues globally that we see. I'm really proud that we finished that three year strategy and we've achieved almost all our aims, almost all of the 75 initiatives we identified three years ago, we've completed and we've looked really hard at what we do next. 

We've now got a new three year strategy.

So our new strategy's all about building off the foundations that we've created over the last three years. We do what we call joined-up whole-portfolio investing. It's quite different and it means that we all have to work together to a common goal, but that can't happen by itself. We need a great culture that supports collaboration, that supports constructive dissent and challenge. We need technology and data that can bring that information together and enable people making decisions to make decisions with the best possible information, looking across what we own and what's happening in the world. And importantly, when we deal with the external world and stakeholders, we want to go one step further than what we have in the past. We want to contribute our insights, and what that means is instead of just talking about the issues that we see, we feel like we can use our networks, our investment program and portfolio, our strategic thinking skills to help our stakeholders, both in the investment community at large and in Canberra to make better policy decisions.

We've had a great year. The investment performance is strong, but we've delivered so much in terms of our business strategy and our improvement programs as well. We've done so much work to understand the changes in the world. We feel like we do understand them, and we have a framework for thinking about policy changes, geopolitical changes, and societal changes, and how that might flow through to investment markets and investment returns and opportunities.