Saudi Arabia's new investment chief said on Sunday that the oil-rich kingdom is too important a market to be shunned by foreign entrepreneurs despite a spate of terror attacks against Westerners.
"Saudi Arabia is one of the large global economies, and it will always be a destination for certain foreign investments," Amr Dabbagh told AFP.
"Competitive advantages of Saudi Arabia will always attract foreign investments, and I honestly feel that terrorism will not deviate the attention of those who are interested in the hydrocarbon market in particular," he said.
"For example, we've just seen a four-billion-dollar commitment by Sumitomo."
Saudi Arabia signed a deal with Japan's Sumitomo Chemical Co on May 9, which set the stage for the development of a 4.3-billion-dollar refining and petrochemical complex on the Red Sea.
The kingdom had earlier signed gas exploration and production deals potentially worth billions of dollars with European, Russian and Chinese consortia.
Dabbagh, a prominent Western-educated businessman, is a member of the World Economic Forum and set up a regional equivalent, the Jeddah Economic Forum, four years ago.
He said his Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) was developing a strategy and business plan targeting specific investors that would address the security issue.
"The idea is to identify specific investment opportunities that are linked to specific competitive advantages, and then match these opportunities with specific investor profiles," said Dabbagh, who took over at SAGIA in March.
"Our communication will be a segmented and focused type of communication with targeted investors.
One part would "focus on the security issue and how we can deal with it. SAGIA will always be here to partner investors," he said.
Dabbagh stressed that terrorism was a global scourge.
"Terrorism is not exclusive to Saudi Arabia. Lots of countries have suffered from terrorism for a long time - Ireland 40 years, Britain 20 years - and yet they have delivered high growth rates," he said.
Moreover, "Saudi Arabia is a large country, larger than Western Europe. So if an incident happens here or there it doesn't mean that the whole country is at risk or that wherever you are you are at risk," Dabbagh said.
"The problem is there, no doubt, but the good news is that Saudi Arabia is committed and serious in dealing with the grass roots of the problem," he added.
Dabbagh said any evidence that the violence had negatively impacted on the economy had yet to emerge, and that included reported moves by foreign companies operating here to open branches or relocate in nearby Bahrain and Dubai.
"All the signals so far have been positive. The way the stock market is mushrooming in terms of value, the way the private sector is reacting to new placements ... shows that the private sector is not paying that much attention to terrorism ... This is also the case with the real estate market," he said.
"As to companies moving or opening offices in other parts of the region, I cannot comment on this at this point in time ... because I don't have specific figures," he said.
SAGIA statistics show a sharp drop in investments since 2002, including between May 2003 and April 2004 compared with the previous 12-month period, when the value of licensed projects fell from 8.9 billion riyals ($2.38 billion) to 6.3 billion riyals ($1.69 billion).
Dabbagh said these figures needed to be re-examined before drawing any conclusions.
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