Translated from Norwegian for information purposes only.  Please note that the text below may differ from the actual address.

Thank you, Ida, and thank you for the trust placed in me to lead Norges Bank Investment Management (hereafter NBIM) for another five years. This is the most meaningful and exciting job I can imagine, and I very much look forward to continuing with my fantastic colleagues at the fund.

On December 6, 2024, the counter on our website exceeded 20,000 billion Norwegian kroner for the first time. It took 23 years from the first deposit into the Government Pension Fund Global (hereafter "the fund") until we reached a value of 10,000 billion. The next 10,000 took just five years. The growth in the fund's value in recent years has simply been incredible.

In 2024 alone, the value of the fund increased by 3,985 billion kroner. The increase was primarily driven by a strong stock market, especially American technology stocks. A weaker Norwegian krone also contributed to increasing the value measured in Norwegian kroner. Additionally, there was a significant inflow of capital to the fund.

Our goal is to outperform the benchmark index and create excess returns over the long term. We did not achieve this in 2024. It was particularly the real estate investments, a somewhat lower equity allocation than in the benchmark index, and an underweight in investments in technology stocks that pulled down performance.

As we take stock a few months into 2025, the value has decreased from its peak level. This is mainly due to currency changes, and the decline is perhaps less than we might have expected given all the uncertainty we now see in the markets.

Sirens, according to ancient Greek mythology, were beautiful and dangerous creatures that lured sailors to shipwreck.

Homer described this in the classic work "The Odyssey." In this tale, the protagonist binds himself to the mast of his ship to avoid being seduced by the sirens.

Hence the expression "to tie oneself to the mast." When you have done that, it is more difficult to do things that are tempting in the moment but not so wise in the long run.

In modern times, we use sirens to warn of danger. On several occasions in recent decades, sirens have sounded in international financial markets, and consequently also for the fund.

The management of the fund rests on two fundamental pillars. One is the governance model with broad political consensus on the fund's long-term strategy. The other is the investment strategy as a long-term and broadly diversified investor in global financial markets.

This is the fund's "mast" to which Parliament has tied itself, and which has served us well through crises and market turmoil.

The fund is one of the world's most long-term investors. This makes us unique and gives us an advantage in competition with others. We want this long-term perspective to be reflected in NBIM to an even greater extent than it is today.

Therefore, we have initiated a project that leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of how we can become more long-term in everything we do. This encompasses everything from incentive structures and training and internal tools, to how we work with companies we own.

An example of this is that at the beginning of the year, we advocated that listed companies should reduce the number of earnings reports from four to two per year. We believe this will help companies get more peace to work and be less exposed to short-term market considerations.

Another important focus area for the fund is technology and artificial intelligence. In this field, we aim to be at the forefront of the financial industry.

We still know little about how finance will be affected by the race in artificial intelligence. But I am absolutely convinced that it will give us an enormous advantage going forward that we in the fund have been early adopters of this technology and made it a natural part of our work.

As you know, the fund is managed near to the index. The term "near to the index" might lead one to believe that one can slavishly follow an index and rarely lift a finger. That is not the case.

Companies continuously enter and exit the index and must therefore be bought and sold on an ongoing basis. In addition, we receive large cash flows into the fund that must be invested, both from current income such as dividends and from oil and gas revenues. Combined, this amounted to around 800 billion kroner last year.

Therefore, we must trade a lot. And when you trade a stock, you can affect the price. This is especially true for such a large investor like us. Therefore, we must trade in the smartest possible way so that we can also trade as cheaply as possible.

And here AI can help us. In August 2023, we started a pilot project to reduce trading costs. This project uses, among other things, AI to anticipate changes in the benchmark index. We have built a model that predicts which stocks we trade a lot in. This requires large amounts of data, and machines are better than humans at analysing this. The savings in trading costs amount to several hundred million kroner.

Another way we use artificial intelligence is by obtaining more and better information as a basis for decision-making when evaluating companies. And we have almost 9,000 companies to monitor. The goal here is not primarily to save costs, but to become better and smarter at collecting and compiling information.

An example of this is how we now gather information from news articles about companies across more than 16 different languages and structure it in a way that makes it manageable to analyse companies' responsibility and ESG. Before, it took us days to get an overview. Now it takes 10 minutes. Artificial intelligence makes us both more efficient and better at the job we do. And we are just at the beginning.

Norges Bank Investment Management has expanded its workforce to create a strong organisation. We do not expect further growth in the number of employees but will focus on increasing efficiency through technology.

I would like to take this opportunity to also mention the importance of openness and transparency for the fund. Last year, I could tell you that we were named the world's most transparent fund by the CEM Transparency Benchmark. But we still had some points left to achieve a full score. We had to do something about that, so in the latest ranking, we received a perfect score - 100 out of 100 possible points. It is difficult to do better than that, but we must continue the work to stay there.

Let me conclude by talking about a changing world. A more challenging world - also from the standpoint of a financial investor. How can we prepare for this?

At NBIM, we focus on what we can influence. We cannot do anything about market turmoil, but we can try to prepare as well as possible. Therefore, contingency planning, training, and exercises are becoming increasingly important for us.

Through scenario analyses, we try to calculate the consequences various global events may have for the fund. One of these is a de-globalised world trade due to increased tariff barriers, resulting in increased inflation and reduced economic growth. In such a scenario, the fund could, according to our calculations, fall by as much as 35 percent - perhaps more. That's a third of the fund's value.

This is by no means science, but the possibility that something like this could happen must be considered and acknowledged by all of us involved in managing the fund.

These are questions that we will spend even more time on in the period ahead.

Thank you for your attention.