Opening Conversation with His Excellency Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan | FII Priority ROME 2026

First of all, good morning, everybody, and I'm really happy to be here in Rome for the FII prior to being in Rome. I would like first of all to congratulate Her Royal Highness Princess Nourah bint Mishari for being the new CEO of the FII Institute, which I think will take it to the next level, hopefully after our event in Riyadh, which is the 10th year anniversary. Going back to the conflict that happened in the Strait of Hormuz, it didn't only affect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the GCC countries, but it had a greater effect not only on the region, but the whole world. And it wasn't only about energy scarcity or a catastrophe, I would even say it was beyond that. It's gone to the petrochemicals, to the fertilizers, to the advanced manufacturing like helium, with GPUs and chips. The good thing that we have in Saudi, both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Aramco, and also the PIF, is we do think in years and decades rather than just quarters. So, we had a similar situation back in the '80s where the Strait of Hormuz was threatened to be blockaded by the Iranian regime, and it was decided since then that we will have a pipeline from east to west. And if it wasn't for this pipeline, we wouldn't have a lifeline for us as a Saudi economy. We are reducing the production; we used to produce before the crisis about 10 million barrels a day with a capacity of producing 12 million barrels a day. And this pipeline was giving us 5.5 million, and we increased it all the way to 7 million with new technologies and innovations that the Aramco engineers had achieved. Also, Aramco has storage facilities around the world, especially in Asia, Korea, and Japan, and we're thinking seriously of having larger storage facilities all over the world. If you look at China, they have storage facilities of about 1.2 billion barrels. The US has almost 800 million barrels. So, if it wasn't for this kind of long-term thinking, the world would have been in a really bad situation, even worse than where we were. For us at the PIF, we always continue to invest, be very much diverse, and our portfolio is structurally resilient. We are a long-term patient investor, and we will remain committed to all of our investments and investment strategy around the world.

We do have challenges, but I think the opportunities are greater. So, if you look at what we've been doing since the beginning in 2017 until the year 2025, we have deployed about 98 billion euros across Europe and the UK, of course. That has given us about 70 billion euros of GDP contribution and created about 160,000 jobs around Europe. Also, Aramco deployed about 80 billion euros with European suppliers, and I think 25% was here in Italy, about 20 billion euros of procurements from suppliers from Italy. We have done a number of JVs with different European parties, and I'll just give an example: Pirelli. We brought them to the automotive cluster north of Jeddah to help us create the automobile industry in Saudi. Of course, we brought in partners and JVs from all over the world. We're also proud of some of our investments in Europe like Pagani, also Benetti. And I think during this conference, we will show about maybe 140 different opportunities that we think can bring a lot of benefits to both parties, the European partners, and also would bring more benefits to us as industries within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Out of the 140, the opportunities that we're talking about that need the strength of European industries is worth a total of about 10.4 billion euros. And this is only until the end of 2030. So, I think the opportunities are more. Now, the challenges you asked me about. And that's what Richard said in his opening remarks. The challenges are mainly regulatory challenges and some of the laws that were supposed to be activated are really hurting investors such as ourselves, Aramco, SABIC, PIF, not only to invest more, but to keep their own investments in Europe. The good thing is the European regulators and policy makers are looking into it, and hopefully we will have better solutions for it.

Yeah, we just released our firm strategy update. We started the first one back in 2017 until the end of 2020, and the second one from 2021 until the end of 2025. And we just got our board to approve our new strategy until the end of 2030. And with this strategy, we want to do two things. First of all, if you look at what PIF did since 2016, we basically brought the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the world. And now our new strategy is to bring the world back to Saudi. We have a new framework with six ecosystems: tourism, urban development, advanced manufacturing, industrial and logistics, clean energy, and the sixth ecosystem is NEOM. So, that's our new strategy. Now, a lot of people thought we will stop deploying investments internationally. Well, I can tell you that we're not going to stop. We'll continue on doing so and deploying investments, but maybe the percentages are going lower, but the absolute numbers will continue on growing since we have continuous growth in our AUM.

One, maybe two words I can say: energy realism. That's what we need to really focus on. Unfortunately, the last decade or so, a lot of push came from the new energy, which is great and I think it's a great addition, but it's not going to be a substitution to the fossil fuel, and we've witnessed this very well during these past few months. The world cannot not rely on fossil fuel. And we're not talking about the energy only. We're not talking about the oil and gas only. We're talking about different industries that rely on oil and gas. Petrochemical industry is a base industry for many other industries, is based on oil and gas. Fertilizers, as I said, food is based on oil and gas. So, we have to be more realistic on what we want to do and how we can do it and when we can deploy it. It's an addition. The world, especially with what's happening right now with AI, the world needs more energy. We cannot say, 'Okay, I will give you energy, but it's going to be double or quadruple the price currently and still do the same thing.' The economics doesn't work this way. So, we at Aramco are taking this seriously. It's a conglomerate. It's not only in oil and gas. We're looking for new solutions. We're investing in AI. We're investing in quantum computing. Aramco is an investor in Pasqal, which is a great quantum computing company. And it's invested in Human, which is a joint venture with PIF on AI. So, the resiliency of our supply chain is very important to us. And the good thing in Aramco, our reliability, even during this conflict, it still was over 99%. So, we're very proud of what we have achieved, especially with all the missile attacks that our facilities suffered. We got them up and running in no time. Usually, it takes years. We did it in a matter of weeks. So, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the men and women, the engineers, the firemen, the operators of Aramco and their courage in really being resilient and giving the full reliability of our supply chain.

Also, we are really proud of our partnership with you. And I think it's not going to be the last thing that we do, but the beginning of many other good things. Thank you.