Spray-applied fireproofing has been manufactured in Dammam since 1985, and the reason is regulatory as much as commercial: fire protection is approved as a tested assembly, which makes substitution difficult and local manufacture valuable. The mandatory Saudi Building Code has sharpened that logic.
Of all the categories that Saudi local content policy is aimed at, passive fire protection is the one where the policy argument is least necessary. The material has been manufactured in the Kingdom for four decades, and the reason has more to do with how fire protection is approved than with any procurement rule.
Fire resistance is not a property of a material. It is a property of a tested assembly: a specific product, at a specific thickness, applied to a specific steel section or slab, prepared in a specific way, and demonstrated in a furnace test to maintain its structural function for a stated period. Change the primer, the section factor, the thickness or the application method and the approval no longer strictly applies. That makes fireproofing unusually resistant to the substitution logic that governs most construction materials, where an equivalent product with equivalent data can be swapped in on site. It also makes the supplier's technical file, and its physical presence during application, part of the product.
Arabian Vermiculite Industries has occupied that position in Saudi Arabia since 1985, when it was established in Dammam by the Khalifa Al Gosaibi group to manufacture fireproofing for a construction sector that was importing it. The business was built on an exclusive manufacturing licence from W. R. Grace of the United States, and it reports more than eight million bags of fireproofing applied since 1988 across several hundred major projects, protecting buildings ranging from hospitals to petrochemical plants, with products used on projects in more than 30 countries. Its range extends beyond spray-applied cementitious fireproofing into firestops, acoustical spray plasters and vermiculite and perlite products.
The regulatory environment around that has hardened. The 2024 edition of the Saudi Building Code became mandatory on 30 June 2025, and the code's module structure includes dedicated fire protection provisions alongside the general building code. Saudi Civil Defence approval sits on top of that for occupied buildings, and conformity assessment bodies accepted for Saudi Building Code work sit between the manufacturer and the approval. The practical effect is that a fire protection specification now has to be evidenced rather than asserted, and the party best placed to evidence it is a manufacturer whose test data, technical staff and applicator training are inside the Kingdom.
That matters more as Saudi Arabia builds the asset classes where fire engineering is most demanding. Tall towers, transport interchanges, stadiums, hospitals, industrial facilities and data centres all carry fire strategies that depend on structural fire resistance being delivered as designed, and all of them are being built at once. The data centre programme in particular concentrates high-value equipment, dense cabling and continuous occupancy in buildings where a fire strategy is an operational requirement rather than a compliance formality.
The specification risk is on the installation side rather than the factory side, and it is where most fireproofing disputes originate. Applied thickness varies with workmanship; density and adhesion depend on mixing and substrate preparation; and the inspection record that proves a fire rating was achieved is generated during a short window while the building is still open. Contractors buying on price alone tend to discover this at the point of Civil Defence inspection, which is the most expensive moment available to discover it.
Fireproofing is also a useful corrective to the assumption that localisation follows heavy industry. It is a chemical and mineral processing business of modest scale whose defensibility comes from certification, application expertise and proximity, not from tonnage. Saudi Arabia has more categories with that shape than its industrial strategy usually recognises — construction chemicals being the closest analogue — and they are the ones where domestic manufacture is most durable, because the barrier to entry is a decade of test data rather than a capital budget.