HRH Prince Alwaleed’s business empire, through Kingdom Holdings, stretches across four continents – so it’s a good job that the Prince’s latest acquisition will help him on his travels all over the globe. Airbus last month named Prince Alwaleed as the first private buyer of an A380 superjumbo, the world’s largest passenger airliner, with a purchase price of around US$320m, well within the budget of the Saudi billionaire.
It is not Prince Alwaleed’s first foray into the skies, and it will not be his last. Kingdom Holding recently paid US$69.86m for a 9% stake in Saudi-based National Air Services (NAS) to gain exposure to the growing regional aviation sector. NAS operates a luxury airline called Al Khayala, low-cost carrier NASair, and a private aviation service that rents and offers part ownership of jets in the Gulf Arab region.
NAS has already revealed that it plans to sell a 30% stake in an initial public offering next year to help finance aircraft purchases, so it looks like another shrewd move from Prince Alwaleed.
The Prince’s empire consists of over 40 investments in a wide range of sectors – from Apple Computers and Citigroup to the Four Seasons and News Corporation. And it is a tribute to the careful acquisition selection process the Prince employs, that he has emerged unblinking from a tricky 12 months for the region’s stocks. Indeed, the strength of the Kingdom Holding brand is such that when the company debuted on the Saudi bourse this year, shares weighed in at an impressive 32% above their IPO price.
Further afield, his shareholding in the world’s biggest bank, Citigroup, is valued at nearly US$6bn, and represents 46.6% of Kingdom Holding’s portfolio. The group’s largest individual shareholder, Prince Alwaleed responded to the US bank’s warning of a 60% fall in third-quarter profits in a cool manner, reiterating his belief that it represented a “mere hiccup”, and saying it would recover in the fourth quarter. The Prince, who bought a US$550m stake in what was then Citicorp in the early 1990s, said he owns 3.6% of Citigroup, and pointed to outstanding first-half results as an encouraging portent for the bank’s future. Sound advice – after all, Prince Alwaleed is rarely wrong, and he has the bank balance to prove it.
The Prince’s influence stretches far beyond the business world. He has very close ties to many Western leaders, and is a prominent philanthropist known and celebrated for his generous donations to a plethora of charitable causes.
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