Bahri has ordered six geared Ultramax dry bulk carriers from International Maritime Industries for SAR 762 million (about $203 million), to be built at the Ras Al-Khair yard and delivered between 2028 and 2029. It is the first large commercial shipbuilding order placed in Saudi Arabia, and it sits inside a $10 billion offtake structure IMI holds with its shareholders.
Bahri has ordered six geared Ultramax dry bulk carriers from International Maritime Industries, the shipyard joint venture at Ras Al-Khair on the Gulf coast. It is the first large commercial shipbuilding order placed in Saudi Arabia, and the first ocean-going merchant vessels the Kingdom will build.
The order is worth SAR 762 million, about $203 million, and the ships are due to be delivered in batches between 2028 and 2029. Bahri, the national shipping company, said the vessels will go into its dry bulk fleet.
Ultramaxes are mid-sized bulk carriers, and the geared variant carries its own cranes. That is the commercially relevant detail: a geared ship can load and discharge at ports that have no shore cranes, which opens up smaller terminals and trade routes that a gearless vessel of the same size cannot serve. For an owner trying to widen a dry bulk book rather than compete on the main iron ore and coal lanes, it is a deliberate choice of asset.
The more consequential part of the announcement is where the ships are being built. International Maritime Industries is a joint venture of Aramco, Bahri, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Lamprell, operating the yard inside the King Salman Global Maritime Industries Complex at Ras Al-Khair. When fully operational the yard is designed to turn out six offshore drilling rigs and more than 40 vessels a year, including very large crude carriers. Until now its work has been offshore rigs and support vessels rather than merchant ships.
New yards are not built on open-market competition, and this one has not been. IMI holds offtake agreements with its shareholders Aramco and Bahri worth roughly $10 billion over ten years, covering 20 rigs and 52 vessels, and at least 75 percent of Bahri's commercial vessel requirements over that period. The bulker order sits inside that structure. It is a guaranteed order book that lets a yard climb the learning curve — hire, train, tune a production line and absorb the cost of first-of-class ships — before it has to win work against Chinese, Korean and Japanese builders on price.
That learning curve is the real project. Shipbuilding productivity is a function of repetition, and the first hulls out of any new yard are slower and dearer than the ones that follow. A 2028 first delivery on an order placed in 2025 implies a long run-in before steel is cut, which is normal for a yard building a class it has not built before. Hyundai Heavy Industries' presence in the shareholding is what supplies the design and production know-how that gap is meant to be closed with.
The location matters for the same industrial-policy reason Ras Al-Khair exists at all. The maritime complex sits in an industrial city that already holds Ma'aden's integrated aluminium and minerals plants, and where Aramco, China's Baoshan Iron and Steel and the Public Investment Fund are building an integrated steel plate complex. Plate is the single largest material input to a hull. Putting a plate mill and a shipyard behind the same fence is the kind of adjacency industrial policy aims for and rarely achieves, though nothing in this order commits the yard to buying domestic steel.
Saudi Arabia's maritime ambition has so far been described mostly in capacity and investment figures. Six bulk carriers is a modest number against a yard designed for 40 vessels a year, and the customer is a shareholder. The test that follows is whether IMI converts a captive order book into repeat orders from owners who are not sitting on its board.