VIENNA — The new oil minister in Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of theOPEC countries, had a message for the global market: Don’t expect us to influence the price of crude oil by adjusting supplies.

“I think managing in the traditional way that we tried in the past may never come again,” the minister, Khalid al-Falih, said on Thursday. “Certainly we will not go with certain price targets.”

The message — which came after the decision on Thursday by the 13-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to maintain high levels of oil production — is central to the changing strategy of the Saudi crude-oil complex. And it could foreshadow a period of volatility for oil prices because OPEC’s policies and the Saudis’ sway have long helped guide the markets.

In a sweeping directive in April, Saudi Arabia set forth plans to diversify its economy, reduce its dependence on oil and pull back on its government handouts. And what Mr. Falih does with Saudi Arabia’s oil — how much the kingdom decides to pump and where the money goes — is the biggest piece of the puzzle.

The global markets received a sneak peak at Thursday’s OPEC meeting, Mr. Falih’s first since his appointment last month as the head of an expanded energy, industry and mining ministry.

While other OPEC members have been urging the freezing or lowering of oil production, Mr. Falih is pushing to keep it high and plow the money into other industries that might prove profitable for Saudi Arabia. He wants the cartel to rethink its longstanding approach and assumptions that it can manage global oil supplies and prices.

It runs counter to the longtime stance of his predecessor, Ali al-Naimi, who presided over an era when OPEC was largely content to restrain production to try to drive prices up.

The Saudis’ shift is easier to justify because price pressures have abated of late. While oil initially dipped on Thursday, it recovered to around $50 a barrel, about twice what it was in January.

Oil producers should “let the market forces continue to seek and find that equilibrium price between supply and demand,” said Mr. Falih, speaking to a small group of reporters in his penthouse hotel suite.

The Saudis can increasingly afford to go their own way. Along with a wealth of oil reserves, Saudi Arabia invested tens of billions of dollars in building a competitive oil business at a time when other OPEC countries like Venezuela and Iran allowed their industries to deteriorate.

Mr. Falih has been at the core of those moves.

Mr. Falih a 1982 graduate of Texas A&M, jumped onto the international oil scene in the early 2000s. Hoping to inject life and competition into the economy, King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler at the time, invited overseas companies to look for natural gas after shutting them out in the 1970s.

To the sucutive at Saudi Aramco, to manage complex negotiations for a series of joint ventures with Royal Dutch Shell of Britain, Total of France and Lukoil of Russia. Although the ventures didn’t find much gas, Mr. Falih garnered credit for deftly juggling conflicting interests.
“After a year or so, I had to accept that he was really good at what he was doing,” said Floris Ansingh, who was the head of Shell in Saudi Arabia at the time. “He understood the different trade-offs.”
Mr. Falih’s international focus set the stage for the evolution of Saudi Aramco.

After he was named chief executive of the company in 2009, he pushed for modernization, trying to turn the state-run oil company into a global competitor that rivaled the private giants in the West. He expanded areas like oil trading and acquisitions and tried to lock up demand by investing in China and in other growing economies.rprise of Western oil executives, the king tapped Mr. Falih, then a young exe