Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH — Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih said that as of Tuesday morning Saudi Arabia hosts 540 regional headquarters for international companies, crossing the 2030 target of 500.

He announced this while speaking at a dialogue session at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center on the sidelines of the eighth edition of the Future Investment Initiative (FII8), which kicked off in Riyadh on Tuesday. "Our target was 500 regional headquarters by 2030 and I am glad to announce we have reached 540 by this morning. Some of them are the major multinational companies and they will be individually announcing their regional headquarters," he said.

Al-Falih said that Saudi Arabia was able to confront various geopolitical challenges globally, thanks to the strength of the economy. "The Saudi economy is at the center of the Middle East. We feel pain if it exists on the human level, and we also see the confusion occurring in the Red Sea," he said.

The happenings may prompt some to question the impact of this on the economy, he said while stressing that this of course has negative effects, but thanks to the Kingdom's Vision as the driving factors are more than the hindering factors.

"Even in the backdrop of this turmoil, we achieved robust growth as the GDP has increased by 70 percent since the launch of the "Kingdom's Vision 2030" until now, and if we look at the G20, during this period and the fluctuations and shocks that occurred, including the shocks in the oil market, we find that Saudi Arabia was the second fastest growing economy among G20," he said.

"If we move to investment, we find that we targeted $3.3 trillion in direct investment, what we call the growth capital equation, adding that this equation is growing by 8 percent year after year, and the number of international company licenses is ten times what it was before the vision, and in the field of tourism, we moved from zero to record number of 100 million tourist visits during the past year," he said.

There are more than 200 sessions at the three-day event with topics including Africa's role in the global economy, enhancing the role of women in leadership positions, economic stability, fair development, and combating climate change, in addition to artificial intelligence, innovation, health, and geopolitical issues.