SAUDI ARABIA - Profile - Abdullah Saleh Al Jum'ah.

Two days after the appointment of Naimi as oil minister, on Aug. 4, 1995, Jum'ah was made acting president and CEO of Saudi Aramco to succeed him. Jumah's position as chief executive of the company was confirmed by a royal decree in December 1995.

A close associate whom Naimi had favoured as his replacement to head Saudi Aramco, Jum'ah previously was executive vice president and board member and headed the International Operations division. It was explained in late 1995 that, while Naimi as a geologist was made oil minister to help speed up upstream expansions at home and function as a minister, Jum'ah was give the top Saudi Aramco post to emphasise the company's international role and overseas acquisitions. This is why the current head of International Operations, SVP Ashgar, reports directly to Jum'ah (see Gas Market Trends).

Jum'ah has vast experience in downstream operations overseas, marketing and industrial relations, now key elements in Saudi Aramco's marketing strategy. He was the man who negotiated Saudi Aramco's move into South Korea in 1991, into the Philippines in 1994 and into Greece in 1995. He participated in the negotiations on the 50-50 partnership between Saudi Aramco and Texaco, which in late 1988 led to the setting up of Star Enterprise in the US, and more recently he backed the mega-merger in the US between Shell, Texaco and Saudi Aramco (see OMT No. 21).

The International Operations unit was partly reorganised after Saudi Aramco's late November 1992 decision to reduce the number of its divisions from seven to five. Jum'ah, then head of this division, built up the unit and was empowered to negotiate major partnerships, under a programme approved by the Supreme Council.

Under Minister Naimi's guidance, in Naimi's capacity as chairman of Saudi Aramco's board of directors, Jum'ah and other executives managed to raise the price of plant gas from $0.50 to $0.75/m BTU as from the beginning of 1998. This affected feedstock supplies to local industries, mostly JVs between Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC) and foreign partners, and fuel gas supplies to Saudi Aramco's local refineries including Samref and Sasref (see DT No. 19). State power utilities and other industries had to pay the same price for gas being supplied to them.

Saudi Aramco's executives also worked on lowering the 30% discount on LPG being supplied to SABIC ventures and other local industries. Now they hope that, eventually, fuel subsidies will be phased out by the state.

Now the focus is on raising gas production capacity on a massive scale and at top speed, with dry gas output to reach 7,000 MCF/day by 2002 as Minister Naimi says of Saudi Aramco's own plan, and on a big expansion of the Saudi electricity and petrochemical sectors. In this, Saudi Aramco may have some of the world's biggest multinationals as partners. About 20 big integrated industrial joint ventures, based on gas, have been proposed by the multinationals and the biggest European majors (see OMT & DT No. 22). Sources close to Jum'ah believe a recommendation on the proposed JVs by a higher petroleum committee under Prince Saud Al Faisal is likely to come out in the first quarter of 2000, rather than in late 1999.

ENI group of Italy has proposed one of the integrated JVs and Enel, Italy's main power utility which is part of ENI, is to be involved in a related IPP. Enel has set up an office in Saudi Arabia to pursue its part of the proposed JV. Its engineering and construction arm, EnelPower, is getting involved in Saudi projects already. In November 1999 it won a $107m contract to build a 130 MW steam turbine generating plant at Yanbu' for the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu'.

Like Naimi, Jum'ah upholds the US style of management inherited from the days when Aramco was an American company, owned by Chevron, Texaco, Exxon and Mobil. Under Naimi, when he was president of Aramco, the American style was carried on in the 1980s and the early 1990s, with Saudi Aramco board members Clinton C. Garvin (ex-chairman of Exxon), Harold J. Haynes (ex-chairman of Chevron) and B. Rodney Wagner (of Morgan Guaranty) providing advice and facilitating things in the US. Three US figures have been retained as members of Saudi Aramco's board since 1989, when King Fahd formed the company's Supreme Council under his chairmanship.

Jum'ah is also the chairman of Motiva Enterprises, the huge US downstream entity which was created in 1998 out of the merger between Shell, Saudi Aramco and Texaco (see OMT No. 21). Motiva's CEO is Wison Berry, formerly president of Texaco's refining and marketing operations in the US. Jum'ah is on excellent terms with Shell group's Chairman and CEO Mark Moody-Stuart and the CEOs of the other multinationals.

In his early 50s, Jum'ah was born in Al Khobar to a well-established Saudi family. He was educated at the American universities of Cairo and Beirut, the latter through an Aramco scholarship. He graduated from AUB with a degree in political science in 1968. In the same year, he joined Aramco's government relations department. In 1972 he joined the company's public relations department, and in 1975 he became manager of that department. In the meantime, he got extensive training in Aramco and in 1976 he completed the Management Development Programme at Harvard University. In 1977, he joined Aramco's power systems division and was one of the first batch of Aramco employees seconded to Saudi Consolidated Electric Company for the Eastern Province (Sceco-East). He also pursued studies at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Mineral Resources in Dhahran.

Jum'ah was promoted steadily and in 1981 he was given his first executive position as vice president in charge of the power systems division. He was also Aramco's representative on the board of directors of Sceco-East, and took over as its managing director. Between 1984-88 he was Saudi Aramco's vice president for government affairs. In July 1988, he was made senior vice president for industrial relations. In 1992, he was made executive vice president for international operations, the post he held until he became CEO of Saudi Aramco on Aug. 4, 1995. Jum'ah has an attractive personality with good leadership qualities.

Salem Said Alydh, vice president for Saudi Aramco affairs, acts as the main assistant to Jum'ah and spokesman for the company.