Arabian Pipes Company's board has approved a SAR 30 million plant in Riyadh's Second Industrial City to manufacture couplings for drilling pipe, with capacity of up to 50,000 units a year. Construction is due to start in the first quarter of 2026, with commercial operations from the second quarter of 2027.
Arabian Pipes Company's board has approved the construction of a plant in Riyadh to manufacture couplings for drilling pipe, at an estimated cost of SAR 30 million, or about $8 million.
The project was approved on 24 December and will be built at the company's existing site in Riyadh's Second Industrial City. It is designed for an annual capacity of up to 50,000 coupling units. In a disclosure to the Saudi Exchange, the company said construction is due to begin in the first quarter of 2026, subject to the necessary regulatory approvals, with completion targeted for the first quarter of 2027, trial production in the same quarter and commercial operations from the second quarter of 2027.
A coupling is the threaded sleeve that joins two lengths of oil country tubular goods, the casing and tubing strings run into a well. It is a small component with disproportionate consequences: the connection is where a string is most likely to fail, and couplings for oil and gas service are precision-machined, heat-treated and individually qualified against operator specifications. That combination of tight tolerances, certification burden and relatively low volume is exactly why such items are usually imported rather than made locally, and why localizing them is a more meaningful step than the capital figure suggests.
Arabian Pipes said the plant supports its strategy of localizing technology and increasing local content, and that it will help the company fulfil supply contracts for casing used in oil and gas wells, meet domestic demand and open export opportunities for couplings. The company added that the project is expected to have a positive effect on its financial statements once commercial production begins.
The commercial logic is integration. Arabian Pipes, which is listed on the Saudi Exchange, already manufactures and coats steel pipe for the oil and gas sector. Making the connections in-house removes an imported item from the middle of its own product, shortens the lead time on a component that has repeatedly been a bottleneck in tubular supply worldwide, and lets the company bid casing packages as a complete scope rather than as pipe plus a third-party connection.
Set against the scale of Saudi oil and gas spending, SAR 30 million is a small investment. Its significance is categorical rather than financial: it moves a specific, technically demanding product from the import column to the domestic manufacturing column, which is the unit in which the Kingdom's localization targets are actually measured. Aramco's supplier scoring rewards exactly this kind of substitution, and the demand behind it is straightforward, since every well drilled in the Kingdom consumes casing and every joint of casing needs a connection.
The location is also a choice worth noting. Riyadh's Second Industrial City sits well away from the Eastern Province cluster where most Saudi oilfield manufacturing has concentrated, and building the coupling line at an existing plant rather than on a new site keeps the capital requirement low, since the site is already producing pipe for the oil and gas sector.
The qualification that goes with any board approval applies here. What has been approved is a project, not a plant. Construction is contingent on regulatory approvals still to be obtained, and the first commercial couplings are not scheduled to leave the site until the second quarter of 2027.