Austrian pension funds’ assets under management increased by 1.55 per cent to €27.60bn in Q2 2024, marking a €421.68m increase compared to the end of Q1, a report from the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) has revealed.

The assets are managed by a total of eight pension funds, five of which are cross-company and three are purely company-related, with 8.49 per cent, or €2.34bn, of the total assets managed accounted for by company pension funds.

The report showed that the number of entitlement and benefit recipients (AWLB) increased by 0.21 per cent to just over 1,081,000 in Q2, of which 13.68 per cent, around 148,000 people, already received a pension benefit from this form of company pension provision.

This means that around one quarter (23.39 per cent) of all employees in Austria already have an entitlement to such a pension benefit, with the assets managed corresponding to around 5.5 per cent of Austria's gross domestic product.

The investment performance, which was calculated by the Oesterreichische Kontrollbank (OeKB), was 1.25 per cent in the second quarter and 3.98 per cent in the entire first half of 2024.

The means that the average performance over the past three, five and ten years is 0.87 per cent, 2.85 per cent and 3.11 per cent respectively.

Around 95.5 per cent of the assets managed by the pension funds were held indirectly via investment funds.

According to the report, shares were the largest investment class held by pension funds, at 39.94 per cent, followed by bonds at 33.28 per cent, bank balances at 6.11 per cent, real estate at 5.92 per cent, loans and credits at 3.14 per cent and other assets at 11.61 per cent.

After currency hedging transactions, around 34.87 per cent of the assets were invested in foreign currency.

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