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Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is allegedly low on cash for new investments, after a multi-year spending spree on the games and esports sectors.
The New York Times reports that the fund doesn’t have a huge amount of capital to deploy at the moment thanks to a number of the projects it has invested in being in “financial distress”.
These include the wildly ambitious new city region Neom, which was set to be built in the country’s Tabuk Province, but has run into extensive construction issues which have been attributed to unrealistic planning. Other businesses yet to return investment include a coffee company, a cruise liner and an electric vehicle startup. None of the assets named as being in trouble are within the video games industry, in which the PIF has been a significant investor in recent years.
The PIF values its total investments at nearly $1 trillion in assets, but a significant percentage of these are hard-to-sell assets with no public valuation; as a result, the NYT reports that the PIF reps have told international investors that it is “unable to allocate” for the near future.
Despite this, a spokesperson for the PIF, Marwan Bakrali, told the newspaper that it had $60 billion in cash and “similar financial instruments”.
Recently, the PIF was one of the parties involved in the acquisition of US publishing giant Electronic Arts along with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. The deal is worth $55 billion and is yet to complete, though EA CEO Andrew Wilson has said that it should close in Q1 of the 2027 financial year.
As well as the megaton purchase of EA, the games industry has significant exposure to Saudi Arabia; the Public Investment Fund owns Savvy Games Group, which in turn is the parent of Monopoly Go maker Scopely and Niantic of Pokémon Go fame.
That’s on top of the PIF’s stakes in a number of developers and publishers. This includes Capcom, Nexon, Embracer Group, Nintendo and Take-Two, in addition to significant investments in esports. Saudi Arabia was planned to host to the Olympic Esports Games in 2027, but the Esports World Cup and the IOC terminated their partnership earlier this month.
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