Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), chairman of Saudi Aramco, and chairman of the board of trustees of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute, said the sovereign wealth fund has a new strategy awaiting final approval before its imminent announcement.
Al-Rumayyan said the PIF’s assets under management are expected to reach $1 trillion by the end of 2025 — nearly four times their size in 2015.
Speaking during a panel discussion on the second day of the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, held under the patronage of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz, Al-Rumayyan said the new strategy focuses on six key sectors: travel, tourism and entertainment as an integrated ecosystem; urban development and quality of life; precision manufacturing and innovation; industry and logistics; clean energy and renewable infrastructure; and NEOM as a standalone entity.
This will help prioritize capital deployment based on clear timelines, said Al-Rumayyan, adding that the Kingdom doesn’t want to invest in everything with the same priority, Al-Rumayyan said.
The PIF governor noted that in 2015, the fund’s assets under management stood at around $150 billion, a figure that has nearly tripled since. He said the goal of reaching $1 trillion in assets by the end of this year is within close reach.
Al-Rumayyan explained that the PIF’s first strategy, launched in 2015, focused on building capacity and addressing gaps across 10 dormant sectors. The sovereign fund’s activities, he said, became a cornerstone of Vision 2030, developed in collaboration with hundreds of participants from ministries, government entities, and the private sector to define the fund’s role by the end of the decade.
He said the PIF has since established more than 100 companies across various industries — from artificial intelligence to tourism and beyond — in efforts to fill these economic gaps.
According to Al-Rumayyan, the fund now employs more than 3,000 people and operates from its Riyadh headquarters with offices in New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, as well as regional offices in Egypt, Jordan, Muscat, and NEOM.
He said Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman has been working tirelessly to accelerate national achievements, instilling this culture of urgency across government institutions.
The Crown Prince’s idea was that the country needed an economic engine, and the most suitable entity for that was the PIF, Al-Rumayyan said. At the time, only a few people were working there, managing existing assets.
What the Crown Prince wanted was to accelerate development at a much faster pace, he continued.
The only way to do that was by bringing in the right people, establishing proper systems, governance frameworks, and having the right proposition, explained the PIF governor, adding that a full diagnosis of operations was conducted and benchmarked against sovereign wealth funds worldwide to understand their mandates and activities.
