Big 5 Construct Saudi's conference programme put procurement and supply-chain resilience in front of a senior audience, with a leadership panel drawing Christopher Seymour of Mace Consult, Darko Macura of Al Kholi Group and Shonagh Kinnaird of Misk City. The session was framed around collaboration, digital transparency and lessons from the Kingdom's major developments.
The conference programme running alongside Big 5 Construct Saudi this week placed procurement and supply-chain resilience at the top of its leadership agenda, in a session that examined governance, collaboration and transparency in complex project delivery. The framing is a reasonable proxy for where the Kingdom's construction conversation has moved: away from securing work and towards delivering it.
The panel brought together three perspectives that rarely share a platform. Christopher Seymour, Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa at Mace Consult, appeared for the consultancy side. Darko Macura, Chief Executive Officer of Al Kholi Group, was announced by the organiser as a speaker at the show and represented the contracting and diversified group perspective. Shonagh Kinnaird MCIOB, Project Director at Misk City, brought the client and developer side of the same problem.
The session's stated scope was collaboration between stakeholders, digital transparency, procurement challenges and the lessons coming out of Saudi Arabia's major developments. It is worth being precise about what that describes. A conference agenda sets out the ground a session covers; it is not a record of positions taken. What the programme does establish is that the organisations closest to the Kingdom's delivery problem agreed the subject was worth an hour of a senior audience's time.
They were not alone on the programme. Speaking organisations across Big 5 Talks included ROSHN Group, Misk City, SEVEN, Al Kholi Group, Saudi Binladin Group, Modern Building Leaders, Kabbani Construction Group, Dussman Ajlan & Bros and the Saudi Building Code Center, across streams covering codes and regulations, health and safety, sustainability, artificial intelligence, technology, project management, concrete, modular construction and HVACR. That is a lineup weighted towards the people who sign contracts rather than the people who write about them.
The reason procurement has climbed the agenda is arithmetical. Saudi Arabia awarded more than SAR30.03 billion of construction contracts across 18 projects in May, its highest month of 2026, and the Saudi Contractors Authority recorded 25 projects worth over SAR29.5 billion in June. A market awarding at that rate is placing simultaneous demands on the same fabricators, the same specialist subcontractors, the same shipping lanes and the same commissioning engineers. Resilience stops being a governance abstraction and becomes a question of whether a specific supplier can serve four clients at once.
Digital transparency, the session's second theme, has an established public-sector spine. Saudi government tendering has been consolidated onto the Etimad platform and the great majority of public procurement now runs through digital channels. What that infrastructure does not yet reach is the layer below the award: the real lead time on a specific item from a specific plant, the stock actually held inside the Kingdom, the status of a submittal, and the identity of a second source if the first slips. Those remain the property of individual supply chains.
The third theme, lessons from major developments, is the one with the most material behind it. The organisations on the programme are running live work at scale — residential communities, a nonprofit city, entertainment and destination assets — and each has already discovered which parts of a supply chain bend and which snap. Whether those lessons travel between organisations that compete for the same subcontractors is the open question, and it is the question a shared platform at a trade show exists to test.