User talk:Riyadhcafe87/Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia

Purpose of draft

This draft is intended to build on the existing version of Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, including additional detail on its role and aims, and further information of more recent deals and agreements such as those in the energy, tourism, and entertainment sectors.

This draft includes many more reliable sources, replacing existing ones where necessary, including some primary sources or dead links.

Proposed new sections/sentences are in italics, and proposed removal/rewording is in strikethrough.

Below is an explanation and rationale for the suggested changes in each section:

General

• When using the abbreviation 'PIF', it’s just referred to as 'PIF', rather than 'the PIF'

Introduction

• Added two new paragraphs summarizing the PIF's formation, role and major projects.
• For the first sentence, it’s clearer just to say “The Public Investment Fund is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia”.
• It’s not necessary to say it was “founded for the purpose of investing funds on behalf of Saudi Arabia”, as a) that’s usually what SWFs do and b) it was actually only later that its mandate expanded to include investment management in the usual sense. I’ve therefore removed that sentence from the intro.

Role

• Added a paragraph on the Public Investment Fund Program within Saudi Vision 2030.
• Added a paragraph on the PIF's six main areas of investment.

History

• Added a new sentence to 1st paragraph on further expansion in 1974 of the PIF's private sector mandate.
• Removed the 'PIF post-CEDA' subtitle, which is unnecessary and potentially misleading as it could be read as the PIF moving away from CEDA instead of coming under the oversight of CEDA.
• Remove the second sentence in the 4th paragraph: The reference in the current version is a page on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that no longer exists. Media sources on this don't mention oil prices, only that CEDA took on oversight with a new board chaired by the Crown Prince.

Investment projects

• Clarified first sentence - there should be some more detail on the French funds investment, i.e. $2 billion invested in renewable energy and SME focused funds.
• The current version has a sentence on Qiddiya (April 2017) after the May 2017 Saudi-US CEO Forum - this draft puts it in the right place chronologically in a paragraph before the paragraph on the Saudi-US CEO Forum.
• Amended the 4th paragraph on the Saudi US CEO Forum: The Blackstone and Lockheed Martin deals are relevant to the PIF but the General Electric deal was with the Ministry of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources. It's not clear what the relevance is of Schwarzman's support for Trump. A clearer account of the Blackstone and Lockheed Martin deals is in italics after the strikethrough:
  • Blackstone was a non-binding memorandum to invest in a $40 billion fund, with a $20 billion commitment from the PIF later in the year.
  • The Lockheed Martin deal was with the Saudi Technology Development and Investment Company (Taqnia, which is owned by the PIF).
• Rephrased the paragraph on the Red Sea project to get rid of more peacock terms (e.g. "spearheaded", "unlocking"), and include the PIF's role in Neom.
• Added 3 new paragraphs on deals with GIC, Magic Leap, SoftBank and AMC Theaters.
• Removed the paragraph on Elon Musk and Tesla: The sources for this (a rogue tweet from Musk, Tesla website, update on Tesla website) are all primary. The reliable secondary sources for this story (e.g. Bloomberg and Reuters) were based only on Musk's tweet, subsequent rumor, and paraphrasing of unnamed sources. Two weeks later it became clear the plan had come to nothing (see this BBC article). In light of all that it doesn't seem necessary to include this.
• Removed the section title 'First Commercial Helicopter', which isn't warranted, and included a mention of this as a short sentence at the end of this section.
• Added info on Lucid Motors, Amaala resort, the Wadi Al Disah project, the announcement on renewable energy, and the recent launch of the commercial helicopter operator.
• Added a line on development of 70% of KSA’s renewable energy.
• Reworded the sentence on Karv Communications to be consistent with the source, which doesn’t say the PIF paid for Karv “to repair the Saudis diplomatic damaged reputation”, but to create a clear distinction with the leadership.
• Added a sentence on the $69 billion SABIC deal.

External links

• Links to the PIF Program (pdf) and PIF page on the Saudi Vision 2030 website.

Article edits

I added {{Infobox company}} to the article from your userspace draft (diff). – Athaenara ✉ 20:26, 23 March 2019 (UTC)