Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced a profit of 138.1 billion riyals ($36.81 billion) in 2023, compared to losses of $15.6 billion a year earlier.
The fund said in a statement that its total revenues more than doubled to $88.3 billion last year, compared to $44 billion in 2022.
The increase in revenues was due to factors including improved investment and non-investment activities in sectors such as banking, telecommunications and gaming, as well as increased dividend distributions.
The fund, which manages assets worth about $925 billion, is the main tool used by Saudi Arabia to reduce the Saudi economy’s dependence on oil revenues.
As part of Vision 2030, the Kingdom is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars through the fund into projects including NEOM, a massive urban and industrial development project that the Kingdom will establish on the Red Sea coast.
The fund’s investment portfolio includes projects from date farms to multinational companies, but its sources of funding come from investment profits and capital injected by the government, government assets transferred to the fund, loans and debt instruments.
The total assets managed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund reached 2.81 trillion riyals ($749.2 billion) by the end of last year, compared to the 2016 baseline of 72 billion riyals ($19 billion), according to the annual report of Saudi Vision 2030 for the year 2023, which was announced in late April.
The report stated that total assets exceeded last year’s target of 2.7 trillion riyals ($720 billion), while the vision’s target is 10 trillion riyals ($2.6 trillion) in 2030.
93 companies were established in the Public Investment Fund’s portfolio in 2023, compared to 71 companies in 2022, and the fund provided 644,000 direct and indirect jobs, compared to 500,000 jobs.
