On Monday, Saudi television broadcast King Salman’s announcement that the plan, dubbed “Saudi Vision 2030” had the royal cabinet’s backing.
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Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince, announced the country’s ambitious “Vision 2030” yesterday. That committee, the Council on Economic and Development Affairs, has been focused on reorienting the kingdom away from its heavy reliance on fossil fuels, creating jobs and boosting foreign investment.
The agenda calls for selling a stake in the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco, which the deputy prince said could be valued at more than trillion.
He says non-oil revenue should reach the equivalent of up to 140 billion euros by 2020 and 235 billion by 2030 – part of it from the diversification of investment, engaging in new opportunities and part of it from exploiting untapped assets that are not used now.
“The vision is a road map of our development and economic goals”, he said.
“So many people today may look at their country practically as an ATM machine, which is very, very, very sad”, he said, particularly as the country faces domestic and regional challenges. “Those are all things any reasonable citizen would want their country to undergo”, said fund manager Ali Al Nasser at London’s Duet Group.
Manufacturing half of Saudi Arabia’s military needs within the kingdom.
“We don’t buy into Mohammed bin Salman’s assertion that Saudi Arabia will no longer be dependent on oil by 2020”, he wrote.
Under the “Vision 2030” programme, Saudi Arabia plans to raise its non-oil revenue to 600 billion riyals ($160 billion) by 2020 and further to 1 trillion riyals ($267 billion) by 2030, from 163.5 billion riyals ($43.6 billion) past year.
According to Prince Mohammed, the value of Aramco is to exceed $2 trillion.
The world’s biggest energy company Saudi Aramco outlined financing plans on Wednesday that will support its expansion into new areas under a sweeping economic reform plan released by Riyadh this week.
With so much capital on its hands, the Saudi SWF would make Riyadh one of the single most important global investors.
On April 25, the Prince unveiled his “Vision for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, a historic plan encompassing broad economic and social changes.
“We restructured the fund”.
The fund had projected in October that oil exporting countries in the region would see revenue losses of $360 billion in 2015, but oil prices took a tumble by year’s end and the drop in revenue amounted to $30 billion more. An initial public offering of Aramco, which will be a complex process given the company’s size and strategic importance, may occur in 2017 or 2018. “It is estimated at between $2 trillion and $2.5 trillion”, Prince Mohammed said.
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Prince Mohammed, a son of the Saudi king who is also head of the country’s economic council, said the state-controlled Public Investment Fund had been restructured to become a hub for Saudi investment overseas, partly by raising money through sales of shares in national oil giant Saudi Aramco.
