PIF Brand Guidelines: Saudi Arabia’s 1971 Fund, a 2015 Overhaul & a 2026–2030 Strategy

A quiet state holder, then a new mandate.

The Public Investment Fund, known as PIF, is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, based in Riyadh. English Wikipedia says it was established in 1971 by Royal Decree M/24, under King Faisal, with the stated purpose of financing projects of strategic significance to the national economy. For much of its history, the same source says, it was a largely passive entity that oversaw the state’s holdings in listed companies.

That changed in the mid-2010s. In July 2014 the Council of Ministers gave the fund authority to set up and finance new companies inside and outside the kingdom, alone or with public and private partners, without the council’s prior approval, English Wikipedia says. In March 2015 oversight of the fund moved from the Ministry of Finance to the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, and a new board was appointed. By the same account, the fund’s staff grew from about 50 in 2015 to nearly 500 in 2018.

The governor is Yasir Al-Rumayyan. The Saudi Press Agency reported on 16 April 2026 that he had presented the fund’s progress at a government press conference marking the approval of its 2026–2030 strategy by the PIF board, which is chaired by Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman.

Scale followed. Arab News, drawing on Asharq Bloomberg and the fund’s own data in August 2026, reported that assets under management rose from about SR500 billion in 2015 to more than SR3.4 trillion in 2025. Part of that growth came through transfers of shares in Saudi Aramco: English Wikipedia records a 4% stake moved to the fund in 2022 and another 4% in 2023.

Companies built at home, stakes abroad.

PIF’s portfolio splits between companies it builds in Saudi Arabia and stakes it buys abroad. At home, English Wikipedia lists large development projects it owns or leads, among them NEOM, Qiddiya and the Red Sea project. It has also created operating companies with their own names. Riyadh Air, a national airline announced on 12 March 2023, is owned by the fund and chaired by Al-Rumayyan; it unveiled its first livery in June 2023 and flew its first commercial service on 26 October 2025, English Wikipedia says. Savvy Games Group, set up by the fund in 2021, is its video-games arm, and Humain, an artificial-intelligence company, was launched in May 2025, by the same source.

Abroad, the fund and SoftBank Group announced the SoftBank Vision Fund in 2016, and PIF has held stakes in companies including Uber and Lucid, English Wikipedia says. In October 2021 a consortium led by the fund completed the purchase of Newcastle United. In December 2023 it took 49% of Rocco Forte Hotels, and in December 2024 it completed the purchase of a 15% stake in Heathrow Airport’s owner, acquired alongside the French investor Ardian, by the same account.

In 2026 a foreign deal of a different scale closed. The Los Angeles Times reported on 5 August 2026 that PIF, together with the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, had completed the take-private of Electronic Arts, the maker of The Sims and the Madden and EA Sports FC games. The deal had been announced in September 2025 and approved by EA’s shareholders in December; EA left Nasdaq, kept its headquarters in Redwood City, California, and kept its chief executive. “Entertainment and sports are key areas of strategic focus for PIF,” Turqi Alnowaiser, the fund’s deputy governor and head of international investments, said in a statement quoted by the paper.

How state funds present themselves.

Sovereign wealth funds and large public pension investors rarely advertise. They manage money for governments or for pension members rather than for retail customers, and their public identity is built mostly from documents: annual reports, responsible-investment reports, governance pages and press releases about individual deals. Norway’s oil fund publishes a year-by-year timeline of its own growth; Singapore’s GIC publishes a report each July with its 20-year returns, while explaining on its website why it does not disclose the size of its assets.

Their websites tend to be restrained. They lead with a mandate — preserving national wealth, paying pensions, investing for future generations — and support it with portfolio overviews, lists of holdings, leadership pages and statements of values. Several also publish stewardship material: how they vote at company meetings, how they engage with boards, and which companies they have excluded or placed under observation, and why. NBIM’s exclusion list, which gives a criterion and a date for each company, is one example.

Their physical presence is usually a handful of offices in financial districts rather than shops or products. NBIM lists offices in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore; English Wikipedia describes GIC’s network of 11 offices in financial capitals. What the public sees of them is mostly a name or a set of initials, a limited palette, and pages of text and charts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each institution — when it was founded, who owns it, what it is mandated to do and how it presents itself — using dated sources and the institutions’ own words, attributed as such. Occasionally one steps outside that register, as GIC did in October 2026 with The Secret Vault, a public exhibition marking its 45th anniversary.

Three letters and a five-year plan.

The fund now describes itself through its strategy documents. The 2026–2030 strategy, approved by the board in April 2026, puts “value creation” at the heart of the next phase, Arab News reported on 13 August 2026: more weight on long-term risk-adjusted returns and discipline in allocating capital, the listing of maturing subsidiaries to bring in other investors, and a gradual move from being the primary engine of growth to building economic ecosystems that attract private capital. The report said the fund keeps a dual mandate of leading economic transformation and earning sustainable returns, and that, by the fund’s data, its total annual return to shareholders has exceeded 7% since 2017.

Its name works in short form. The Saudi Press Agency and the foreign papers cited here refer to the fund as “PIF,” and its officials speak for it under that name; its operating companies, from Riyadh Air to Savvy Games Group and Humain, trade under names of their own, and Riyadh Air unveiled a livery of its own in June 2023. The current strategy is set out in an official report with seven stated objectives, Arab News reported.

For a design guide, PIF shows how a state fund can keep a plain three-letter name while the companies it creates build separate identities. Compare QIA, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi state investor. For this guide we use a deep green, a warm sand and a muted gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PIF’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.