Dear colleagues,
I want to thank you for your incredibly hard work last year. While the year ahead looks set to be challenging, our newly approved 2019-2021 Business Plan steers us toward greater resilience, more fiscal discipline, and increased flexibility — enabling us to effectively respond to continued oil market challenges and volatility.
Yet it also supports our clear, long-term corporate strategy, which is very ambitious, and will be an exciting journey for all of us.
For decades, we have been known as an oil powerhouse. But by 2030, instead of being the foremost global player in one business, we plan to be world leaders in five more.
We intend to be among the top three gas producers globally and export gas for the first time ever, in a world where the use of clean natural gas is rapidly expanding.
We also see our integrated Downstream operations becoming just as significant as our Upstream. That includes a world-class refining business in the largest and fastest growing countries in the world; a world-class player in trading and retail; becoming a lot stronger in base oils; and critically, building one of the world’s largest and high-value adding chemicals business, with crude oil at its heart as feedstock, while also including cutting-edge nonmetallic materials. In fact, our Downstream capital program shows our determination to stretch the value of every barrel of oil we produce, and find additional, reliable destinations for our growing production.
Cutting across all of these businesses, we intend to be a world leading creator of game changing technology, which will help us to solve some of our industry’s (and indeed the world’s) most pressing challenges — especially climate change.
But the crucial factor to our success, now and in the future, will be how you — our employees — respond. We can only build this new Saudi Aramco through a culture of excellence, resilience, and passion for our work.
For example, in the current business environment, success will only be possible if we all make it a personal priority to focus relentlessly on managing and optimizing our costs.
It is all a part of being engaged and energized to work at Saudi Aramco. This company remains at the heart of global energy supply. We are also playing a pivotal role in the global energy transition (as well as the Kingdom’s transformation) currently underway.
There are so many exciting opportunities opening up with a vastly expanded business scope and rapidly expanding geographical spread, where we are constantly pushing the frontiers of technology, and needing people with skills that are not even known yet, but will be critical if we are to write a new chapter in our company’s history.
So we are determined to increase empowerment, and unlock the talent of our youth and women at all levels. Above all, we trust you to give your best and have meaningful — as well as rewarding — careers.
Finally, we will never compromise on safety or the environment, as they are the bedrock of our global reputation, and show we care about our people and the world we live in.
What does this all add up to?
Taken together, I have no doubt that we will see Saudi Aramco increasingly recognized as the world’s most important company, in a category of our own, on a mission you can be proud of.
Thank you again for all your hard (and often historic) work last year. I wish you and your families a peaceful and prosperous 2019.
Amin Nasser,
President and CEO