Riyadh International Industry Week closed with 337 exhibitors from 17 countries and a programme built around localization. The categories Saudi Arabia has localized share one feature — a repeating domestic order book — and the ones it has not, from wind drivetrains to refinery catalysts, share the opposite.
Riyadh International Industry Week closed this week with 337 exhibitors from 17 countries and more than 14,000 visitors, and a conference programme the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources built around a single theme: localization. Four days of stands and panels is a poor guide to industrial capability. What the week did usefully expose is the shape of the gap — which components Saudi Arabia now makes, and which ones its construction and energy programmes still buy on a ship.
The pattern is consistent across sectors. Localization has worked where the product is heavy, specification-tolerant and expensive to move: structural steel fabrication, cable, pipe, tanks and vessels, concrete products, low- and medium-voltage switchgear, valves. It has not worked where the engineering is proprietary, the qualification cycle is long and the annual volume is small. That is not a Saudi failing; it is the same boundary every industrialising economy runs into. But the mega-project pipeline makes the second category unusually expensive.
Wind is the clearest case. Saudi Arabia has attached one of the most demanding localization requirements in the region to its renewable programme, at 75 percent by 2030, and the solar half of the response is visible: the Renewable Energy Localization Company, wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund, signed joint ventures in 2024 that are meant to bring 30 GW of solar manufacturing from ingots through to modules into the Kingdom. The wind equivalent has moved far more slowly. A turbine and component venture announced with Envision Energy in the same period has produced no plant that anyone can point to, and turbines are still arriving through Jeddah and Dammam while regional rivals compete for the same nacelle and blade plants.
The physical reasons are worth stating, because they explain why the wind gap has stayed open. A modern onshore blade is 70 metres or more and cannot practically be moved far inland by road; blade plants are built beside the projects they serve or beside a port. Nacelle assembly is the easy part of the value chain and the least valuable; gearboxes, generators, main bearings and power electronics are the parts that carry the engineering, and they are made in a handful of places worldwide. A localization target expressed as a percentage can be met by the assembly end while none of the difficult content moves.
Catalysts are the second gap, and a larger one in value terms. Saudi Arabia is among the world's biggest refiners and petrochemical producers, and it buys most of the catalyst that makes those plants work from abroad — a dependency that is invisible until a supply chain breaks. SABIC has been working the problem deliberately, acquiring the process licensor Scientific Design and announcing three catalyst plants under the Shareek programme. Aramco has approached it from the other end, signing an agreement last year with REZEL for the Kingdom's first plant combining catalyst manufacture with the reclamation of metals from spent catalyst. Neither is producing. Both are the right shape of answer.
Some of the list has closed. High-voltage direct current systems were an import category until January, when Alfanar opened a Riyadh factory making converter valves and cooling systems; Schneider Electric is adding switchgear and power system lines in Riyadh, Dammam and at King Salman Energy Park. Steel plate, which the Kingdom has imported for shipbuilding, pressure vessels and energy fabrication, is being addressed by the plate mill under construction at Ras Al-Khair with Baoshan Iron and Steel. In each case the trigger was the same: a visible, repeating domestic order book.
That is the mechanism, and it explains what is left. A component plant needs volume between projects, not during them. Mega-project demand is lumpy by construction — a stadium programme, an airport terminal, a transmission expansion — and it produces a spike that no manufacturer will tool up for and then a trough that strands the tooling. Which is why the localization that has actually happened clusters around buyers with continuous replacement demand rather than around the giga-projects themselves: refineries and gas plants needing valves and pipe every turnaround, a grid replacing transformers on a rolling cycle, mines consuming reagents and wear parts monthly.
Aramco has made that logic explicit by publishing its own gap list: more than 200 identified localization opportunities across a dozen sectors, with an annual market estimated at around $28 billion. It is the most useful document in Saudi industrial policy precisely because it is a demand statement rather than an incentive scheme. The equivalent for the construction pipeline does not really exist, which is part of the reason that pipeline still imports facade systems, lifts and escalators, large chillers, tunnelling equipment and most heavy plant.
The honest measure of progress is not the number of factories opened or the local content percentage reported. It is narrower: how many product categories moved from imported to domestically qualified in a given year, and whether the plants that make them sell to anyone other than the buyer that called them into existence. On that measure the last twelve months have been better than the ten years before them, and the list of remaining categories is still long.