Arab News, Wednesday, Sep 2, 2020 | Muharram 14, 1442
Saudi Arabia's Future Investment Initiative postponed until January
Saudi Arabia: The Future Investment Initiative (FII), Saudi
Arabia’s flagship financial forum, has been postponed until early next year
because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizers said.
The event, which has become a fixture in the global investment calendar in the
short time since its launch in 2017, was scheduled for late next month but has
been put back until the end of January.
The organizers, the FII Institute, said: “After careful consideration and
assessment of the global travel and airline outlook, as well as the regulations
imposed by a significant number of countries, and in the context of the efforts
deployed to overcome the impact of COVID-19, we have decided to postpone the
fourth edition of the FII, initially scheduled to take place from Oct. 28-29,
2020 in Riyadh, to Jan. 26-28 under the theme ‘The Neo-Renaissance.’”
One executive involved in the event said that consideration had been given to
staging a “virtual” FII but it was decided that an in-person event was
preferable, even if it had to be delayed.
“The challenge was not guaranteeing safety once in Saudi Arabia, but the
difficulties of getting there and back for a three-day event,” he added.
The forum is likely to stick to the schedule already drawn up under the
neo-renaissance theme, focusing on healthcare, sustainability, artificial
intelligence and robotics, the executive said.
Richard Attias, a member of the FII Institute’s board of directors, last month
said he was still aiming to stage an in-person event.
“I think virtual events are OK but it’s not, to be honest, the best way to
definitely do business together,” he said. “It is not the best way to talk about
big investments. You cannot make deals of billions of dollars and investment of
billions of dollars just through virtual conversation.”
With the global pandemic continuing to affect many parts of the world, some
countries have re-imposed travel restrictions and curfew regulations on air
travelers. Flights to and from the Kingdom are still heavily restricted, with
international airports closed to passenger traffic.
FII — dubbed “Davos in the desert” but held in the luxury of the Ritz-Carlton
hotel and conference center in Riyadh for the past three years — attracts
thousands of participants from the biggest corporations and investment
institutions in the world. Business deals worth billions of dollars have been
signed during the event.
The end of January is normally a busy time on the international forums circuit,
with the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting traditionally taking place at
that time in Davos, Switzerland. For 2021, however, that event has been moved to
the summer, again because of pandemic-related travel concerns.