Saudi Arabia's civil aviation regulator says the winning consortium for the Abha International Airport terminal concession will be named within three months. The 30-year build-transfer-operate contract covers a 65,000 square metre terminal plus apron, taxiway and utility works, and is the first of a new wave of regional airport privatisations.
Saudi Arabia is close to naming the consortium that will design, finance, build and operate a new passenger terminal at Abha International Airport, the first award in a round of regional airport privatisations the Kingdom intends to extend to Taif, Qassim and Hail.
Abdulaziz Al-Duailej, president of the General Authority of Civil Aviation, told a panel on logistics investment at the Supply Chain and Logistics Conference in Riyadh that the winning bidder would be announced within three months, and that more than 100 companies had engaged with the process. He described Abha as the first of a wider privatisation wave.
Nothing has been built. Abha continues to operate from the terminal it has, and the figures attached to the project describe what the concession is meant to produce rather than what exists. The airport is rated at roughly 1.5 million passengers a year and its terminal covers about 10,500 square metres. The first phase replaces that with a building of about 65,000 square metres, and the full programme is intended to take Abha beyond 13 million passengers a year and past 90,000 aircraft movements, against roughly 30,000 today.
The tender is being run by Matarat Holding, the state civil aviation holding company, alongside the National Centre for Privatisation and PPP. It is structured as a build-transfer-operate contract running 30 years including the construction period, so the private partner carries the capital cost and the construction risk, then earns its return from operating the asset before handing it back to the state.
The scope is wider than a terminal building, which is the part contractors will be reading closely. It covers a new rapid-exit taxiway on the existing runway, a new apron serving the new terminal, access roads, a car park, an expansion of the electrical substation and a new sewage treatment plant. That bundles airside civils and site utilities into the same package as the building, work that in a conventional procurement would sit with the airport operator and be tendered separately.
Four groups were prequalified to bid. They are GMR Airports of India; Mada TAV, pairing Mada International Holding with Turkey's TAV Havalimanlari Holding; the Touwaik Alliance of Skilled Engineers Contracting, Turkey's Limak Insaat, Incheon International Airport Corporation, Dar Al-Handasah Consultants and Obermeyer Middle East; and a consortium of Vision International Investment, Asyad Holding and DAA International. Each pairs an international airport operator with construction and engineering capability, which is the shape this model tends to produce. The operator underwrites the revenue case; the contractors build to it.
Matarat's transaction advisers on the deal are Deloitte on financial matters, ALG on technical and Ashurst on legal.
The commercial case at Abha rests on the Asir highlands. The province draws domestic visitors through the summer for its climate and mountain terrain, and the airport is the practical gateway to it. A terminal sized for 1.5 million passengers is the binding constraint on that traffic, and the concession is an attempt to shift the cost of relieving it off the government's own capital budget. The new building is planned with 20 gates and 41 check-in positions, seven of them self-service kiosks, with completion of the first phase targeted for 2028.
Saudi Arabia has run this structure once before at scale. Prince Mohammad bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Madinah was privatised in 2016 under a build-transfer-operate concession, and GACA still cites it as the template. What is different now is volume. Instead of one flagship airport, the authority is preparing a sequence of regional ones, with Taif, Qassim and Hail identified to follow.
The three-month statement is best read as a target rather than a date. The Abha tender has already run through an expression-of-interest stage, prequalification and a request for proposals, and its bid deadline was extended once along the way. Awards of this type are normally followed by a further period of documentation before financial close, and no concrete is poured until that is finished.