Technology shares on Wall Street have fallen sharply in response to the emergence of a low cost chatbot, Deep Seekers, already leading to a reranking in AI leadership. Agentic AI is basically a robot in a digital form. AI is sucking up incredible amount of capital. About 80% of the gains in the stock market this year have been powered by AI. And I think the two big nations, China and the US, know that the country that's on top of the new technologies will probably emerge as the most powerful nation also of this century. In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world. Reciprocal, that means they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple. We begin with developments from Kyiv ongoing war, like the Ukrainians. I very much hope that we will have peace in Ukraine, but I am worried that we might push peace to keep ceasefire, which will lead to a very expensive peace. You don't have the cards right now. The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which came into force yesterday, appears to be holding. Is the United States now at war with Venezuela? There's not a war. An all-time high for the market, despite this remarkable backdrop of uncertainty. I actually think to have a long-term plan and a long-term mandate in these turbulent times is a very, very good idea. Right, warm welcome. Who would have thought that with that backdrop, the fund was now at the end of the year, standing at more than 21000 billion. And strong returns, 3 years in a row, 15% up second third year with double-digit returns. And, of course, given the size of the fund, the also the return in Norwegian Kroner has been very strong. So, we also had inflows last year, 327 billion. That is a significant amount, albeit a little bit less than we've seen in the previous three years. So, if you take those three things together, that's what determines the change of the value of the fund from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. The returns are more than 2300 billion. The inflow of 320 billion. And then you have a stronger Kroner, which weakens the value of the fund measured in Norwegian Kroner.

We also released this morning, a set of stress tests. So, those are supposed to be scenarios, which are somehow realistic and very could have very severe impacts on the fund. So, we have four scenarios. One is what we call AI correction, i.e. that, you know, you have a broad market sell-off, should, you know, the expected productivity gains and and income from the AI not materialized. We also have one scenario, which we call fragmented world. And, as you can, you know, understand, it's more about the the world dividing into blocks. You have less trade between these blocks. You have increased inflation. You have lower growth, and that will also impact the portfolio severely, up to 37% as we model. Yeah. Third stress test scenario that you could envisage is a regional debt crisis. So, what that means is that you have high government debt in many parts of the world. And, if the investors lose confidence in the ability for governments to service that debt, they would start to move their capital out of those regions. Yeah. Finally, we also have a fourth scenario, which we call an extreme weather scenario. So, here, we try to model the impact of things like drought, you know, floods, storms, which would have impact on crops, which would feed through the value chain and lower growth and higher inflation as a consequence.

Relative returns, negative 28 basis points. And we will explain just where that is coming from. Equities had positive 7 basis points. Fixed income, very strong year. This is the bond portfolio. So really, really great numbers. Real assets, that's real estate. And the reason why those numbers are negative is because the real estate numbers have been flat. But what we measure it against is a combination of stocks and bonds. So, it's the relative kind of result of one thing being flat and the other one continuing to go up, which is the result of that. And then allocation, negative 8, that's mainly an underweight we've had in equities. So altogether, negative 28 basis points. Since inception, still positive, roughly 200 billion Norwegian Kroner. Yeah, so if you go through the different asset classes that the fund is invested in, the 15% on the overall fund is driven by first and foremost, 19%, a very strong year in equity markets. That's the biggest part of our portfolio, 70% as a starting point. Also, very good returns in our infrastructure portfolio of 18%. But that's the smallest part of our portfolio in the middle. Also positive returns for our fixed income portfolio, roughly 30% and also on unlisted real estate.

Okay, equities is up, as Jones said, 19%. And what's been going particularly strong here? Well, the whole market, after a dip in connection with introduction of tariffs in in the spring, the market had pretty kind of smooth recovery and ended the year strong. When you look at what's been driving this, we've had basic material being particularly strong. You've seen what's happened to, to metal prices, gold, silver, copper, and so on, really driving that. Financials also strong, and then real estate being kind of the worst performing sector. In terms of where the monetary gains come from, given that the technology sector is the largest sector and account for many of the biggest holdings, you'll see that returns here, nearly 900 billion. Financial is nearly 700 billions and industrials at 300 billion. Yeah. And, if you break that down even further by single companies and see the contribution from our single company investments, you see this top 10 list dominated by technology, 5 of them, US technology companies, but also a couple of other regions represented this year, Netherlands, South Korea, China. Yeah. And, that means that, and we've spoken about this many times before how the concentration risk of the portfolio has increased, and also through 25 increased even further. So, these top 10 holdings, or the top 10 holdings of of the equity portfolio now constitutes 20% of that portfolio. And highest level. We've we've ever seen yeah. Okay, to explain some of the developments we've seen in the market. We are very pleased to have some of our analysts. Just tell you what's been going on in the market. And we start with Arnab calling in from New York. Arnab. Good morning, Nicolai. Thank you. So, for years, the world of bits and digits outperformed the wars of atoms and molecules, perhaps because they couldn't be quarantined or tariffed. But in 2025, the metals in the periodic table made a very strong comeback. There are three main drivers behind this 40% plus gain. First, inflation has eroded trust in traditional currencies. Hard assets such as gold have been climbing for years, but 2025 was exceptional, with gold stocks rallying over 150% as central banks bought aggressively amid geopolitical uncertainties, wars, territorial emissions and trade disputes. The gold rally also spread to silver and other precious metals. Second, the world fears that we are running short on critical metals. Copper mines around the world have been having supply issues. Meantime, China controls most rare and downstream refining. So governments started asking do we have secure supply and the prices have reflected this concern? Finally, AI needs physical infrastructure. Data centers and AI chips require enormous amounts of copper and other junior metals. This is adding to the fear around the demand supply balances. So in summary, in uncertain times, investors and speculators turn to what is tangible and scarce. You can't print more copper or gold, and this fear and scarcity proved quite valuable in 2025. Thank you so much, Arnab. That's very interesting.

We move on to technology, and we will hear from our portfolio manager, Kaina Sucha, who is a portfolio manager in hardware technology. Kaina, are you with us? Absolutely, happy to be here. 2025 was another remarkable year for tech. Can you hear me? Okay, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. 2025 was another remarkable year for tech. As you saw the sector gained over 20% and drove nearly 60% of total marker returns. But under the hood, it was year of exceptional volatility and wide gaps between winners and losers. Most of you may remember the deep sell-off in late January when investors were confronted with the introduction of high-perform Chinese AI models and began questioning Western dominance in AI. Yeah. Liberation Day tariffs in April triggered another sharp sell-off, but was ultimately the starting point for strong rise in stocks through October as investors rotated back into AI infrastructure, while the end of the year saw a growing number of large AI announcements from OpenAI, Oracle and others. Investors again began scrutinizing the size of these investments and started pointing fingers at what looked like circular funding between companies. Yeah. Under the surface, not all tech was in the green last year. Semiconductor companies stood out as the relative winners, especially those that sought tight supply, while certain software companies underperformed as investors grappled with whether AI enhances or disrupts traditional business models. Among the tech giants, Alphabet stood out as a clear winner, reclaiming the AI crown, at least for now, with a successful launch of Gemini 3. The question moving into this year is how the adoption of AI will continue. Large companies around the world have started implementing AI tools at scale and are seeing meaningful productivity gains. Already. Over half of Fortune 500 companies are now using Cursor, the AI code editor, and ChatGPT now serves over 800 million users weekly. But the market isn't without risks, and we're bracing ourselves for yet another volatile year in tech where debates around potential bubbles, profitability, power constraints and competition with China will continue to dominate the conversation. Thank you, Kaina.

We are moving on to financials, and we have Phil joining us from London. By it here, Nicolai, it's a pleasure to be with you again. As your chart showed, financials delivered another strong year up 30%. At the top of the list were the banks, big banks in the US like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but notably European banks, many of whom doubled during the year and perhaps interestingly for you in the room, the European Bank index has now outperformed the Magnificent Seven over the last five years. Why is this happening? So, let's focus on the banks. And I'll give you three reasons. Firstly, economies have continued to grow. This has fueled loan demand and has meant that debt servicing has remained very strong. Secondly, Wall Street is booming. This is a combination of volatility, which is creating trading opportunities and rising corporate optimism, which is fueling demand for mergers and acquisitions services. And. Thirdly, regulators, politicians and banks are all aligned in trying to get their economies to grow. Where do we go from here? And this is a bit more tricky. Market now expects that banks will continue to grow their earnings in each year for the next three years. This needs Wall Street to keep going and economies to keep growing. This is certainly possible, but the bar is a lot higher given price movements. So on the team, we are taking less risk today than we were 12 months ago, and we have rotated at the margin into some of the less favored segments of financial services. Let's see if that works. But that's what I have you today. Okay. Thanks a lot, Phil. So, we'll move from equities to fixed income now. That's roughly a third of the portfolio or 27% to be exact. It had a strong year last year. We had 5% returns on our fixed income portfolio. And to talk about what happened in the fixed income markets. We have Gudri Hado, who is head of fixed income Europe for us. Good. It, please, mine. Okay. Yeah. So 2025 was a year when a lot of things happened, and yet fixed income markets were still for the most part, and with a major exception, relatively calm, so you had tariff shocks, AI revolution, geopolitical shocks, renewed fiscal concerns. And then uncertainty both about how these would actually play out, but also about how they would affect inflation, labor markets, monetary policy. So take AI, is it going to lead to increased productivity, therefore, lower inflation, therefore, lower rates? Or is it going to lead to increased investment, higher energy demand, and therefore, higher rates? And so with many moving pieces, what are central bank policymakers weighing when they set their interest rates? So, if you look at the market, there is sort of two main patent in 2025. That I can see the first one, which is a smaller difference between the 10 year yields in large economies, that isn't necessarily strongly connected to either one of these shocks. So, the highest yields, the UK and the US, they saw their ten year rates fall as central banks cut interest rates and lower yielded Japan moved in the opposite direction. So yields rose as Japan raised rates, but also as fiscal concerns mounted. And second yield curves steepened significantly. So, that is, as central bank cut short-term interest rates, the gap between the short-term and the long-term costs widened. So, that's due to increase uncertainty as well changes to investor preference and also expected increased issuance. So say Germany, for example, the ECB cut rates four times last year, and yet German ten year yields ended slightly higher than where they started, which was largely driven by expectations of increased government spending. So looking ahead to 2026, it's already clear that it will continue to be a year with more uncertainty and more shocks. And we look forward to following it. Very good, Gudri.

Okay, real estate. So, as you know, real estate has been an area where we have not performed well over the last few years. Last year, the unlisted part were up 4%, but the listed part was down 4. So total result. Here is is a big fat 0. We have made changes. We have a new strategy, which is out. And we also have new management running this. And we are pleased to have Alex with us from California. So pretty, pretty early for you. Good morning. Thank you Nikcoai. So for real estate, 2025 was a year of relative stability after several years of turbulence in the markets, really driven by the rise in interest rates. And so while an unexciting year was a relief for some, it still suffered real estate that is from a lack of relative appeal compared to those more exciting areas like tech. The one area that was hot in our space was data centers. And the exuberance there was seen every day. But aside from that, the sentiment was relatively muted. Yeah. At the same time, the list, the excuse me, at the same time listed real estate even gave back some gains from the prior year. The expectation of a recovery was brought forward in listed markets, perhaps more than was more than was pardon me more than people expected. So the market has been looking for that sign of recovery where it's going to come from is almost certainly from what our actually quite strong occupational fundamentals. Okay. Rents have been gradually rising. Development, and new construction is subdued, and that is always the sign of a new recovery about to form. So, we expect the fundamentals to continue to improve through the course of 2026. We expect our new strategy to be able to take advantage of sellers who now, at the end of those years of turbulence need to sell. And so we're cautiously optimistic about the road ahead of us. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. And thank you for staying up for us. So, we'll round off this walk through of the different asset classes with infrastructure for renewable energy. So, this is an asset class that came into demand that five years ago. We were deliberately slow in building up that portfolio. But that has changed over the last few years. So, now we're ramping up. We also built out the team. So, we think we are in a very good position to build this portfolio even further. It had a very good year last year. And to tell us more about that, we have Hadal from Hyn, who is our global head of energy and infrastructure. Hu. Thank you, John. Yes. We are seeing that the renewables are coming back into favor for sure and also record pace of buildouts. Last year alone, we saw a global buildout of 800 gigawatts of new renewable capacity that's like adding 20 times of Norway's entire power production system in just one year. And this took Norway 125 years to build. Also, we saw that the share prices of several of the largest renewable energy companies in the world have stabilized or even moved up somewhat in 2025. Why? Well, the world needs more electricity for data centers for AI electric cars, heat pumps and so on. We are seeing the electrification of everything. And, wind and solar are still the cheapest and fastest way to add new capacity now also supported by ever better batteries. This has created new bottlenecks, such as the grid, which is needed to move this clean energy to where people are. At EmBM, we have invested more than ever in unlisted renewable energy in 2025, over 100 billion Norwegian Kroners. We have now stakes and wind farm and solar farm projects around the world. We have a new partnership with RWE in 2025, which secured significant positions in the largest offshore wind parks in Europe. These two transactions alone more than doubled our portfolio. Our single biggest move in 2025 already, however, was to secure a 22% stake in TenneT Germany, Germany's largest TSO transmission system operator. These transmission systems are critical for enabling the energy transition and for energy security. We'll continue to invest going forward, where we find the most robust returns, most improving technologies, stable countries, and essential infrastructure. The energy transition is not going away. It gets less attention because it's become part of normal business, but it's moving faster than ever. Thank you, Tro. Thank you. Thank you, Harald.

Okay, so we'll round off this press conference with the key points for 25. Another strong year, 15% returns in accounting terms. That's more than 2000 billion Norwegian Kroners. So, one of the strongest returns there as well. We were slightly behind the benchmark, 28 basis points, and the funds stood at more than 25000 billion Kroner at the end of the year. We also published all our holdings as.