Riyadh Hosts Future Investment Initiative

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Premier and Minister of Defense, will inaugurate the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh on Tuesday.

With the participation of over 2,500 delegates and leading business figures from more than 60 countries, the conference will debate the opportunities and challenges that will shape the world economy and investment environment over the coming decades.

The first day of the event will begin with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin leading a panel of financial experts in debating the new social, economic and intellectual frameworks needed to drive progress.

In particular, the session will discuss the emerging trends which will likely have the greatest impact and how public and private sector leaders can use these to succeed.

Speakers on the panel include Amin Nasser, president of Saudi Aramco, Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, managing director of the Public Investment Fund, and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

Another key session will examine breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, big data, social media, medical science, and smart infrastructure that are now converging to reinvent cities for the 21st century.

The session will be chaired by Maria Bartiromo, global markets editor for Fox Business, with the participation of high-profile attendees, including Masayoshi Son, chairman of Softbank Group.

The first day will conclude with energy executives congregating at the “Summit on Energy for a Sustainable Planet” to discuss which technologies and innovations will shape the sector over the next ten years.

Taking place in the context of volatile oil prices and significant advances in energy and environmental technologies, the summit will also examine the challenges of diversification through investment in renewable resources.

Other sessions will explore topics such as the “Future of the Information Economy”, “Leadership and Partnership for the Age of Uncertainty” and “What Policies Can Drive Growth”.

The daily plenary sessions, created in collaboration with the event’s official Knowledge Partners – BCG, EY, McKinsey and Oliver Wyman – will seek to stimulate expert-led debate on how societies and businesses can achieve sustainable, long-term financial returns while having a positive and lasting impact.

Pedro Oliveira, Oliver Wyman managing partner in the MEA region, said: “We see the Future Investment Initiative as a unique opportunity for the global community to bring together, in Saudi Arabia, aspirational thinking around the future of the world economy with the realities of investment.”

The invitation-only event is being organized in the context of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, a blueprint that is already charting the path for the Kingdom to harness its strategic location and strong investment capabilities.

The Libyan oil export port of Hariga has stopped operating due to insufficient crude supplies, two engineers at the terminal told Reuters on Saturday, as a standoff between rival political factions shuts most of the country's oilfields.

This week's flare-up in a dispute over control of the central bank threatens a new bout of instability in the North African country, a major oil producer that is split between eastern and western factions.

The eastern-based administration, which controls oilfields that account for almost all the country's production, are demanding western authorities back down over the replacement of the central bank governor - a key position in a state where control over oil revenue is the biggest prize for all factions.

Exports from Hariga stopped following the near-total shutdown of the Sarir oilfield, the port's main supplier, the engineers said.

Sarir normally produces about 209,000 barrels per day (bpd). Libya pumped about 1.18 million bpd in July in total.

Libya's National Oil Corporation NOC, which controls the country's oil resources, said on Friday the recent oilfield closures have caused the loss of approximately 63% of total oil production.

Riyadh Hosts Future Investment Initiative