Cairo: The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign investment fund, has announced founding a high-technology company for heritage-inspired storytelling.
The QSAS (stories) company will work to develop interactive experiences reliant on advanced technology to tell stories inspired by the Saudi culture and history, PIF said.
The firm will focus on developing, owning and operating world-class interactive exhibitions across Saudi Arabia to propel demand for specific cultural experiences offered to visitors, including pilgrims and tourists.
Furthermore, QSAS is envisaged to furnish a gamut of interactive expositions, including roving exhibitions, to provide experiences that cater to visitors’ tastes and bolster the kingdom’s culture and tourism sectors as well as to contribute to localising knowledge-based technology for content creation.
The company will initially start with the launch of local exhibits telling stories inspired by the Islamic history and Saudi heritage before heading to global markets with attention to diversity of the narrative sources.
QSAS is expected to create more than 11,000 direct and indirect jobs by the year 2030.
In recent years, the kingdom, Islam’s birthplace, has introduced a set of facilities aimed to draw more tourists as part of an ambitious development scheme designed to overhaul oil-reliant economy.
The Saudi tourism industry is flourishing. The number of tourists surged to more than 100 million last year.
Saudi Tourism Minister Ahmed Al Khateeb said earlier this year the kingdom’s tourism sector in 2023 fulfilled a target of 100 million tourists including 77 million local visitors and 27 million tourist arrivals.
He cited a strategy charted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman envisaging 150 million tourists annually in the country by 2030 including 80 million domestic tourists and 70 foreign million arrivals. The aim is also to make Saudi Arabia rank among the world’s top 10 tourist attractors.
