Olayan's Way

A Saudi who buys American

With his short, grizzled hair and dour expression, he looks more like the head of a Soviet trade mission than a Saudi businessman with far-flung interests and resources. He owns no jets or yachts, and is never seen at the playgrounds of the rich. Suliman Olayan, 62, is instead a self-made, thoroughly westernized entrepreneur who, among other activities, has been quietly using a cash surplus of about $300 million to buy big stakes in more than 60 U.S. companies.

Nonetheless, Olayan's name was rarely seen on the financial pages until October, when he paid $18 million to raise his holdings in the First Chicago Corp., which owns the ninth largest U.S. bank, from 4.5% to 7.5%. Later, for the first time, he accepted an invitation to join a U.S. board of directors. That was at Mobil, the nation's No. 2 oil company; Olayan owns $15 million worth of stock in Mobil, which depends on Saudi wells for about half its crude oil.

For all of his anonymity, Olayan is well known to influential Americans such as Occidental Petroleum Boss Armand Hammer, former Bechtel Chief Stephen Bechtel and Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller. Says Olayan, whose investment in Chase is second only to Rockefeller's 1.7%: "I make quite sure that my share is always smaller than his." The man in charge of Olayan's U.S. operations, run from its headquarters on Manhattan's Park Avenue, is ex-Treasury Secretary William Simon, who is also one of Ronald Reagan's advisers.

The son of a spice merchant, Olayan (pronounced o-la-yan) started work in 1937 as a dispatcher for an organization that became the Arabian American Oil Co. and used his excellent English, learned in high school in Bahrain, to make himself invaluable. In time he was negotiating land rights for Aramco and accompanying its resident boss on visits to the Saudi royal court. In 1947, when Aramco began a major pipeline project, Olayan was asked to become a contractor. He mortgaged his house for $8,000, bought four trucks and was on his way.

Eventually his contracting firm became the nucleus of the Olayan Saudi Holding Co., a Riyadh-based-conglomerate that boasts revenues of $300 million a year from such varied sources as sales of International Harvester construction equipment and the distribution of Campbell's soups and other foods. An Olayan-controlled insurance firm, the first in Saudi Arabia, earned $101 million in brokerage fees last year; another Olayan outfit owns or controls 35 companies engaged variously in farming chickens, desalinating water and building Riyadh's new $4 billion airport.

Olayan calls Aramco "my university." His years there taught him how Western corporations operate and made him eager to do business with them. Aside from some real estate in England and interests in a few West German companies, his investments are concentrated in the U.S. Most of his portfolio is in shares of utilities and companies involved in coal and other resources. But about a third of his holdings are in stocks of nine banks. Explains Olayan: "Their resources are infinite. Their raw material is money, and it does not deplete" like oil and gas. Associates also cite a gut interest in banking, perhaps stemming from a time 15 years ago when Olayan's Saudi companies were overextended and Citibank called in $2 million in loans. Says a friend: "Since then he has had a hate-love relationship with banks. He can get very excited when he tells of how they almost pulled the rug out from under him."

Olayan has no desire to run the companies he invests in. He keeps his holdings low, because "after 10%, you become part of management." The one exception is his more than 11% stake (worth $8 million) in the brokerage firm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. When Chairman Richard Jenrette, an old Olayan friend, asked him if he wanted to put a representative on the board, Olayan replied, "You are my representative."

He takes pride in advisory posts he holds at the Stanford Research Institute and Rockefeller University. Three of his four children have U.S. degrees and his third wife, Mary Padikis Olayan, once a secretary for Aramco, is American. Now that his only son, Khaled, 32, is running the Saudi companies, Olayan appears to be concentrating on the U.S. economy to provide his business with a long-enduring international dimension.

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