Sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East are set to outspend global peers for a fourth consecutive year with 40 per cent of all flows, despite lower oil prices and Saudi Arabia increasingly focusing on domestic investments.
The report comes days after a consortium backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund signed a $55bn deal to take video games maker Electronic Arts private, highlighting the continued financial clout of the kingdom and other state-owned investment entities in the wider region.
Sustained investment by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, the vast majority in the Gulf, comes even as Brent crude prices have fallen to an average $69.93 per barrel this year, down from $81.82 in the first nine months of 2024, prompting speculation that it may constrain governments’ spending.
Gulf sovereign wealth funds have topped spending on overseas investments since 2022 — when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine led to a surge in energy prices — and the Global SWF data shows that their finances have remained strong even as oil prices have eased.
Diego López, managing director and founder of Global SWF, said the findings showed that lower oil prices were not affecting countries equally and that the majority had healthy finances.
“Four out of the six GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries are still in surplus,” he said. “Money is still flowing to the sovereign wealth funds, they have to put it to work . . . that is one of the reasons that they keep being quite aggressive in the marketplace.”
Global SWF’s estimates are extrapolated from publicly available information as Gulf sovereign wealth funds generally do not report quarterly data and some, such as Abu Dhabi and Qatar’s investment authorities, do not reveal the size of their assets or many of their deals.
The outlay by Gulf sovereign wealth funds has come even as the regional heavyweight, Saudi Arabia’s $925bn PIF, has said it intends to concentrate on domestic investments, with just a fifth of its investments deployed abroad.
López said that even with 80 per cent of the PIF’s portfolio allocated domestically, that would still leave about $200bn to be deployed in other countries, meaning that “they’re still a very active investor overseas”.
Abu Dhabi’s state-owned investment company Mubadala was the most active spender in the nine months to the end of September with $17.4bn, according to Global SWF’s estimates. The emirate’s sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, came second with $9.6bn, while Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund spent $7.6bn.
Mubadala, which invests in both developed and emerging markets, is “doing everything, everywhere, all at the same time”, López said. The $330bn Abu Dhabi investor previously reported that it had increased investments by a third in 2024 to $32.4bn.
ADIA, Mubadala and Qatar Investment Authority all declined to comment on Global SWF’s figures.
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