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OSLO, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Norway's $1.1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, made a 1.6% return on investment in the third quarter, earning 236 billion Norwegian crowns ($25.55 billion), it said on Wednesday.
"Equity and fixed income investments had another quarter with positive returns," CEO Yngve Slyngstad said in a statement.
"We saw a particularly positive contribution from U.S. treasuries and North American stocks, which returned 4.6% and 2.9% respectively," he said.
The return for the quarter was in line with the fund's benchmark index, it said.
With a population of less than 5.4 million, the Norwegian fund's quarterly return works out to almost $4,800 per citizen.
It invests Norway's oil and gas revenue in foreign stocks, bonds and real estate and last week its value hit an all-time high value of 10 trillion Norwegian crowns.
It does not plan to invest in Saudi Aramco when the Saudi oil company carries out its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO), Slyngstad said on Wednesday.
"Saudi Arabia is not part of our reference index," he told a news conference.
The fund's largest fixed-income holdings are in U.S. government bonds.
It owns stakes in more than 9,000 companies globally, with its biggest holdings in tech giants Microsoft Corp MSFT.O and Apple Inc AAPL.O, followed by Switzerland's Nestle SA NESN.S, Google parent firm Alphabet Inc GOOGL.O and Amazon Inc AMZN.O.
($1 = 9.2341 Norwegian crowns)
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Terje Solsvik and Jason Neely)
((terje.solsvik@thomsonreuters.com; +47 918 666 70))
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