Sulaiman S. Olayan

Suliman Saleh Olayan (Arabic: سليمان العليان‎‎) (November 5, 1918 – July 4, 2002) was among Saudi Arabia's wealthiest businessmen.

Orphaned at the age of six, Olayan had more humble beginnings than most of his business counterparts from the Kingdom. Olayan's rise to great wealth reflected his acumen, an ability to cross cultural barriers, as well as extraordinary timing.

Over a 55-year career as an independent businessman, he served as entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. Under his guidance and leadership, the Olayan Group became both a leading diversified enterprise in Saudi Arabia and a major participant in global investing.

The story of his entrepreneurial journey begins in the town of Unayzah in north central Saudi Arabia. For centuries, the town had been a haven for caravans venturing across the Najd, Saudi Arabia's heartland. The merchant families of Unayzah had developed important trading links with the world outside central Arabia - the cities on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast, which had ties to Africa and Asia.

In 1918, Suliman Olayan was born into one of these merchant families. His father, Saleh, had recently returned from Medina, where he had been a spice trader. Suliman spent the first years of his life in his family's ancestral hometown.

Suliman's mother died just a few months after he was born, and his father died when he was still a child. When he was about 10 years old, Suliman traveled with his older brother by camel to the Persian Gulf coast and then by boat to Bahrain. In Bahrain, at the dawn of the age of oil in that part of the Persian Gulf, Suliman attended the American school, where he learned English, and then the Al-Khalifa and Al-Jafariya schools. He proved to be an exceptional student with a prodigious memory and an uncanny ability to see things not just as they were but as they could be. After leaving school in 1936, he went to work for The Bahrain Petroleum Company. A year later, he returned to Saudi Arabia to take a job with the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, the forerunner of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). By 1947, Suliman had risen from transportation dispatcher to storehouse supervisor to a position in Government Relations. During King Abdul Aziz Al Saud's historic visit to Dhahran in April of that year, Suliman served as a company translator.

In the wake of World War II, the oil industry was expanding rapidly. Sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Suliman set out on his own in the summer of 1947. With a personal loan secured on his home, he established General Contracting Company (GCC).

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