Financial Analyst

While all four siblings are Olayan Group board members, sisters Lubna and Hutham are its most visible public faces. As chief executive officer of the group’s Riyadh-based Middle East division, Olayan Financing Co., Lubna is the most prominent female executive in a country where women make up just 16 percent of the workforce, according to Saudi Arabia’s Central Department of Statistics and Information.

Olayan, who met her American husband while studying at Cornell University, began working as a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan in New York after getting an MBA from Indiana University. She joined the family business in 1983 at the behest of her father, Suliman Olayan. It was an abrupt transition to Riyadh, where few women worked, but she had the benefit of her father’s mentorship.

Oreos, Coca-Cola

An orphan from modest means, Suliman Olayan’s rise to riches was notable for his lack of blood ties to the Saudi royal family. He began working as a dispatcher for the predecessor company of Saudi Aramco at age 19. When the business started working on a major pipeline 10 years later, Olayan mortgaged his house for $4,000, bought a few trucks and won a contract to help build it.

His contracting company became the foundation for what evolved into the Olayan Group. Like many family-owned companies in Saudi Arabia at the time, it grew by providing services to the mushrooming oil industry as well as a modernizing population. Through Olayan’s partnerships, Saudis got access to Colgate toothpaste, Oreos and Coca-Cola.

In 1961, Olayan began buying stakes in major U.S. equities to use as credit with U.S. banks that wouldn’t loan against his Saudi assets, according to a 2013 speech given by his daughter, Hutham. The company’s holdings now include an interest in U.K. utility National Grid, a $700 million property portfolio in Paris and 5.5 percent of Credit Suisse Group AG, a stake acquired in 2011.

Global Reach

Olayan’s global reach is to be expected for a company that’s in part a private equity firm, said David Butter of Chatham House.

“It’s an old company, it’s been around a long time and in the 60s and 70s there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for M&A in the Gulf,” Butter said. “So they gravitated toward the opportunities.”