Aramco says its iktva supply chain localization programme has hit its 70 percent local content target and will aim for 75 percent by 2030. The company credits the programme with $280 billion added to Saudi GDP, more than 200,000 jobs and over 350 investments from 35 countries in new manufacturing facilities.
Aramco has said its iktva supply chain programme has reached its target of 70 percent local content in the goods and services the company buys, and has set a new objective of 75 percent by 2030.
The announcement puts numbers against a programme that has run for a decade. Aramco says iktva has added $280 billion to Saudi gross domestic product since launch, attracted $9 billion of inward investment and contributed to more than 200,000 direct and indirect jobs across the Kingdom. It also says the programme has drawn more than 350 investments from 35 countries into new manufacturing facilities in Saudi Arabia, and that 47 strategic products are now made domestically for the first time.
iktva, short for In-Kingdom Total Value Add, is a procurement instrument rather than a subsidy. It measures the proportion of Aramco's supplier spending that stays inside the Saudi economy, counting locally manufactured goods, locally delivered services, Saudi employment, training and supplier development, and it feeds that score into decisions about who wins work. Because Aramco is by a wide margin the largest industrial buyer in the country, the score functions as a market access condition. That is the mechanism behind the 350 investments: for a foreign manufacturer, a plant in Dammam is not a public relations exercise but a prerequisite for competing.
The headline percentage should be read for what it is. It is a spend-weighted measure across goods, services and labour, not a claim that seven out of every ten items Aramco buys are manufactured in Saudi Arabia. Services and manpower localize more easily than high-specification hardware, and the mix matters. The most substantive figure in the announcement is arguably not the 70 percent but the 47 products being made in the Kingdom for the first time, because each of those represents a manufacturing capability that did not previously exist.
The next five percentage points will be harder to win than the seventy already banked. What remains concentrated in the imported share of the spend is the equipment where qualification is slow, tolerances are tight and volumes are low: subsea hardware, large rotating equipment, specialised alloys, control systems and heavy offshore fabrication. Localizing those requires not just a factory but an approval process, a qualified workforce and enough order flow to keep a plant economic between projects. That last condition is the one Aramco's own capital programme has been supplying, through offshore expansion, gas processing construction and the downstream build-out in Jubail and Yanbu.
The 2030 target also lands alongside a broader shift in how the Kingdom talks about localization. The question is moving from whether a supplier's value is added in Saudi Arabia to whether the resulting industrial base can sell to anyone other than Aramco. A plant that exists only to satisfy one buyer's scoring system is a cost centre for the economy; a plant that exports is an industry. Aramco's own framing of iktva has increasingly emphasised inward investment and job creation rather than procurement compliance, which points in that direction.
For suppliers, the practical implication is unchanged and immediate. The threshold has moved, the scoring still governs access to one of the world's largest energy procurement budgets, and the companies that have already committed capital to manufacturing in the Eastern Province are the ones best placed as the target tightens.