Saudi wealth fund sets up investment firms in five countries including Oman

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has established five regional investment companies in Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan, Iraq and Oman, the sovereign wealth fund said on Wednesday, following a similar move to set up an investment subsidiary in Egypt.

The six companies will target investments of up to $24 billion, PIF added, in sectors including infrastructure, real estate, mining, healthcare, food and agriculture, manufacturing and tech. The Saudi Egyptian Investment Company, the PIF subsidiary set up earlier this year, took minority stakes worth $1.3 billion in August in four listed Egyptian companies.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries have pledged billions of dollars of investments in Egypt, where economic woes have deepened since the war in Ukraine. Establishing the five new subsidiaries “will contribute to an increase in regional investment opportunities for PIF’s portfolio companies and Saudi Arabia’s private sector, bolstering attractive financial returns over the long term, and creating more avenues for strategic economic collaboration with the private sector in the target countries as well as enabling the Saudi private sector,” PIF said.

The announcement was made on the second day of Riyadh’s flagship FII investment conference. PIF, which manages about $620 billion in assets and aims to grow that to over $1 trillion by 2025, said the move aligns with its strategy to seek new investments in the Middle East and North Africa, grow its assets under management and diversify Saudi Arabia’s revenue sources.

The fund, which is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s chosen vehicle to drive an ambitious economic agenda to wean the economy off oil, was the second most active state investor between January and October, with 39 deals valued at $17.2 billion during the period, according to wealth fund tracker Global SWF.