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“There is no crisis at the Caisse, unlike what happened in 2008,” new chief executive officer Charles Emond said Friday on a conference call with reporters. “We have all the liquidity we need and plenty of room to manoeuvre. The liquidity we have is sufficient to meet the needs of our depositors, to help Quebec companies and to invest in an agile and opportunistic way to create returns. Risks have been tightly managed.”
Net assets shrank to $333 billion as of June 30 from $340.1 billion at the end of 2019, the Caisse said.
Real estate fared worst among the Caisse’s main asset classes, posting a negative 11.7 per cent return. Equities, a category that includes publicly traded stocks as well as private equity, returned negative five per cent, while infrastructure assets such as airports returned negative one per cent. Fixed income was the lone bright spot, returning 4.1 per cent.
Ivanhoé Cambridge, the Caisse’s property arm, said in February it wanted to cut its exposure to Canadian malls and would look to sell about eight Canadian shopping centres by 2023, now that shoppers are increasingly turning to e-commerce at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores.
Retail’s challenges during the pandemic have led Ivanhoé Cambridge to speed up the implementation of its action plan, the Caisse said Friday.
Valuations of Ivanhoé Cambridge’s assets “reflect the difficulties with shopping centres, which are heightened by the COVID-19 crisis,” the Caisse said.
