Public Investment Fund Sticks to Overseas Deals as Regional Tensions Rise - Bloomberg
The top official at Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund said it remains committed to investments around the world despite growing concerns over the mounting economic costs of the war.
“The Saudi macroeconomic and physical position remains strong, stable and resilient,” said Yasir Al Rumayyan, governor of the $1 trillion Public Investment Fund. “We measure our returns not in quarters but in decades, and PIF remains committed to its investments around the world.”
Al Rumayyan was speaking at the Future Investment Initiative event in Miami, against the backdrop of a regional war that’s now in its fourth week. Over the past month, Iran has attacked energy infrastructure across the oil-rich region, raising concerns that the kingdom and other Gulf nations might pull back from international investments.
Tehran’s projectiles have hit Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil refinery at Ras Tanura, and repeatedly targeted the kingdom’s Shaybah oil field, which has the capacity to produce 1 million barrels of crude a day.
Still, Gulf sovereign investors are pressing ahead with global dealmaking. Savvy Games Group, a unit of the PIF, agreed to buy Moonton from ByteDance this month in a deal valuing the mobile games maker at $6 billion.
Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, has also been active in March, while Qatar’s wealth fund and a Bahraini aluminum firm both announced large deals in the first week of the war.
In his comments, Al Rumayyan touched upon the PIF’s upcoming long-term investment strategy. The wealth fund wants to include the private sector in its work, both domestically and internationally, he said, highlighting sectors including renewables and data centers.
“We want the whole world to come and invest in Saudi,” he said.
In a separate conversation, Yazeed Al Humied, one of the fund’s two deputy governors and chief of its Middle East and North Africa unit, said private credit was another area of focus. The kingdom is “significantly under-served,” he said, adding that the regulator is supporting efforts to bolster that pocket of finance.
At the event, King Street Capital Management LP said it had signed an agreement to invest in alternative credit with the PIF’s backing. That adds to a rush by private credit firms, who have been jockeying for deals in Saudi Arabia, where liquidity in the banking system has been drained by the kingdom’s economic diversification projects.
The wealth fund is the main driver of that multitrillion-dollar diversification plan known as Vision 2030. It plans to boost total annual deployment to $70 billion a year after 2025 and emphasized that its investments in absolute dollar terms will continue to rise abroad even as it focuses at home.
In the months before the conflict began, officials in Riyadh had started making tougher spending decisions, ordering sweeping reviews of ambitious projects across the country and beginning to pivot toward areas more likely to attract foreign investment.
FII Miami is an invitation-only conference that’s run by an organization affiliated with the PIF and is meant to be a smaller version of an annual event in Riyadh. US President Donald Trump is headlining the three-day conference, an annual bash that lures titans of finance and politics.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump threatened Iran with intensified military action after Tehran rejected Washington’s push for peace talks, a sign he’s not backing down.
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