China's sovereign wealth fund has said it will invest 500 million dollars in SouthGobi Energy Resources, a unit of Canada's Ivanhoe Mines with coal operations in Mongolia.
The major investment in SouthGobi is the latest for the 200-billion-dollar China Investment Corp (CIC) as Beijing tries to secure access to energy resources and diversify its investments away from US dollar assets.
SouthGobi operates the Ovoot Tolgoi coal mine in the south Gobi desert, the same region where Ivanhoe and Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto three weeks ago sealed a deal to develop one of the world's richest copper deposits.
Ivanhoe and Rio signed a four-billion-dollar agreement with Mongolia to exploit Oyu Tolgoi, marking one of the biggest investments in the former Soviet satellite state since it turned to capitalism two decades ago.
CIC will make the investment in SouthGobi through its wholly-owned subsidiary Fullbloom Investment Corporation, according to a statement published on CIC's website Monday.
In recent months, CIC has invested billions of dollars in companies in Canada, Indonesia and Hong Kong with interests in coal, copper and iron ore.
After seeing its investments in US bank Morgan Stanley and private-equity firm Blackstone Group crushed by the global crisis, the fund is pumping up its exposure to resources companies.
CIC was set up in 2007 to help China find more lucrative ways to place its massive foreign exchange reserves, which stood at 2.27 trillion dollars at the end of September and are parked mainly in low-yield instruments such as US Treasury bonds.
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