Delegates at a Miami conference urged to continue investing in the region
Saudi Arabia
Gulf officials had a clear line for the US business community gathered in Miami this week at a Saudi Arabia-backed investment conference: stay calm and keep investing in the region.
The cautious pitch, delivered four weeks into a regional war sparked by the US-Israeli attack on Iran, marked a sharp contrast to a year ago when American investors were promised a new dawn of co-operation between the US and the oil-rich Gulf.
Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — one of the world’s most powerful sovereign wealth funds and an investor in US companies such as Uber and Blackstone — barely mentioned the war when he opened the conference on Thursday.
“The Saudi microeconomic and physical position remains strong, stable and resilient, and the PIF portfolio is well diversified and structurally resilient,” he said. “We are a long-term patient investor. We measure our returns not in quarters, but in decades and PIF remains committed to its investments around the world.”
Global investors whose travel to the region has been disrupted by the conflict said they appreciated the effort made by officials from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to reassure them about the future.
But behind the scenes of the event, entitled Future Investment Initiative Priority Miami, the mood was noticeably different.
People who met privately with Gulf officials said the tone was far more worrying. Some warned that if the war dragged on beyond April it could have a greater impact on the kingdom’s economy and its ability to continue investing abroad at the same pace.
Mohammed al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia’s finance minister, acknowledged the conflict needed to be resolved quickly.
“It is an impact that is more severe than even we have seen post-Covid . . . If this continues I think we will see an even more severe impact,” he added.
“Obviously oil has taken the centre stage in terms of media coverage but it is not just oil that has been significantly impacted. It is refined products, its fertilisers, it is in aluminum and feeds and petrochemicals,” Jadaan said, referring to the near stoppage of traffic through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
