Ma'aden reported record aluminium and phosphate production for 2025, with revenue up 19 percent to SR38.58 billion and net profit at SR7.35 billion. The company has said it intends to double its aluminium business over five years, though no expansion has been publicly sanctioned.
Ma'aden has reported record aluminium and phosphate production for 2025, lifting revenue 19 percent to SR38.58 billion and net profit attributable to shareholders to SR7.35 billion from SR2.87 billion a year earlier.
Gross profit rose 60 percent to SR14.79 billion. The company attributed the improvement to higher market prices for phosphate, aluminium and gold and to higher sales volumes in phosphate and aluminium, partly offset by slightly lower gold sales volumes. Its realised gold price averaged SR3,511 an ounce, up 46 percent on the year.
For the aluminium business, the result matters less for the profit it generated than for what it says about run rate. Ma'aden's integrated complex at Ras Al-Khair on the Gulf coast comprises an alumina refinery designed for 1.8 million tonnes a year, a smelter of about 740,000 tonnes a year and a rolling mill of about 380,000 tonnes a year. Those are the capacities the complex was built to. Running at records against them is the precondition for the expansion the company has committed to, because a smelter that cannot hold its design rate is not a candidate for a second one.
In January, Ma'aden said it intends to double its aluminium business over the next five years as part of a $110 billion capital programme covering eight megaprojects over a decade. Doubling primary aluminium is a heavier undertaking than the phrase suggests. Capacity is added in potlines, each requiring firm power in the hundreds of megawatts delivered continuously; an interruption of a few hours freezes the metal in the pots. Smelting is among the largest single consumers of electricity in any industrial economy, which is why the economics turn almost entirely on the delivered cost and reliability of power rather than on labour or ore.
The alumina side has to move with it. A refinery designed for 1.8 million tonnes a year covers a smelter of the present size with some headroom; it does not cover a smelter twice that size. Doubling the metal without adding refining capacity would mean buying alumina on the open market, which is a materially different and more volatile cost structure than making it on site.
That is also the argument for doing it in Saudi Arabia. A country with surplus low-cost energy and a coastal site with its own port has a structural cost position in primary aluminium that does not depend on having bauxite nearby.
What the complex produces, though, is semi-finished metal: ingot, billet, slab and rolled coil. The industrial value the Kingdom's policy is aimed at sits further down the chain, in extrusion for construction and transport, in coated and converted rolled product for building envelopes and packaging, and in fabrication into components. Those are separate businesses from smelting, with different customers, much lower capital intensity and much lower barriers to entry. A smelter expansion does not create them; it supplies them.
The nearest source of that downstream demand is domestic. Saudi Arabia's construction programme consumes facade, curtain wall and structural product, and electricity transmission uses aluminium conductor as standard. Whether that demand is met by Saudi converters buying Saudi metal, or by imported semi-finished product, is a question the primary capacity build does not itself answer.
One qualification on the expansion. Nothing has been sanctioned publicly: no capacity, no site, no date, no cost. What Ma'aden has published is an intention to double the business over five years within a decade-long capital envelope. Until a potline is committed, the record output reported for 2025 is the aluminium capacity Saudi Arabia actually has.