Alessa Industries, a Saudi group tracing back to 1935 whose subsidiaries include Alessa for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning and Huntair Arabia, is exhibiting at HVACR Saudi Arabia. It is selling into a Kingdom HVAC market worth about $3.3 billion in 2025 and forecast to reach $6.3 billion by 2034.
Alessa Industries is at HVACR Saudi Arabia this week arguing a case that has become considerably easier to make than it was five years ago: that cooling equipment for the Kingdom should be built in the Kingdom, close to the projects that install it and the technicians who maintain it.
The group traces back to 1935 and the trading business founded by Hamad Abdullah Alessa, and now operates as a Saudi holding company over a set of manufacturing and services subsidiaries. Those include Alessa for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Company, the group's principal air-conditioning manufacturer, alongside Huntair Arabia, Al Essa Advance Project Company, Hamad Abdullah Al Essa and Sons Company, and a dedicated maintenance and operations business. Its stated manufacturing competence spans air conditioners, chillers, coolers, heat exchangers, dampers, actuators and air control products.
CRAFFT is among the group's air-conditioning brands, covering window and split units, floor-standing and concealed equipment in cooling capacities from around 9,000 to 60,000 BTU per hour, supported by a customer service network covering Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. The refrigeration line extends into refrigerators and freezers. The group describes its air-conditioning arm as the largest manufacturer in its field in the Kingdom, a claim of the kind that is worth testing against installed base rather than accepting at face value.
The market it is selling into is expanding on a broad front. Saudi Arabia's HVAC market was valued at about $3.3 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach roughly $6.3 billion by 2034, with cooling accounting for close to 77 per cent of installations. The faster-growing segment is data-centre cooling, projected to rise from $153 million in 2025 to about $836 million by 2035 at an 18.5 per cent compound rate. Underneath both sits a construction market forecast to grow 6.2 per cent this year to around SAR 232.14 billion, and an industrial base that reached 13,660 active facilities in April.
Those three demand streams have different requirements, which is the strategic complication for any Gulf air-conditioning manufacturer. Residential and light commercial equipment is a volume business decided by unit cost, distribution and energy labelling. Applied plant for towers, hospitals and industrial facilities is an engineered sale decided by part-load efficiency, serviceability and integration with a building management system. Data-centre cooling is a third discipline again, with continuous high-density loads, tight temperature control and redundancy requirements that leave no tolerance for a failure. Competing across all three requires depth that few regional manufacturers have.
Where a domestic manufacturer holds a structural advantage is the part of the lifecycle that follows installation. Cooling equipment in Saudi conditions works hard, and availability of spares, speed of a service call and the quality of local technical support determine whether a system delivers its design performance over twenty years or degrades quietly into an energy bill nobody has interrogated. That advantage matters more now that facilities management contracts in the Kingdom routinely carry energy performance obligations, and the operator inheriting badly commissioned plant carries the penalty.
Procurement policy points the same way. The Local Content and Government Procurement Authority applies a minimum 40 per cent local content threshold on public tenders and phased in higher minimum percentages for products on its national mandatory list in February 2026, which affects a meaningful share of the hospitals, schools, government buildings and public infrastructure that consume cooling plant.
The competitive pressure is real, from international manufacturers with Gulf assembly, from regional groups, and from Asian producers competing hard on unit price in the volume segments. The differentiators a buyer should test on the stand are the ones that survive a twenty-year operating life: measured part-load efficiency, refrigerant strategy, spares held inside the Kingdom, and a service organisation that can reach a site in the north-west as readily as one in Riyadh.
HVACR Saudi Arabia runs at Riyadh Front until 2 September, co-located with Big 5 Construct Saudi.