The Saudi Ports Authority has signed seven contracts worth close to SAR 1 billion with national and international companies to build and expand logistics centres at Jeddah Islamic Port and the Al-Khumra logistics zone. The facilities cover more than 384,000 square metres and are aimed at storage, consolidation and re-export.
The Saudi Ports Authority has signed seven contracts worth close to SAR 1 billion with national and international companies to build and expand logistics centres at Jeddah Islamic Port and the neighbouring Al-Khumra logistics zone. The facilities will cover more than 384,000 square metres and are intended for storage, consolidation and re-export.
Roughly $170 million of private capital committed to warehouse space is a modest figure alongside the terminal investments announced at Saudi ports this year. It is also, in some respects, the more revealing one, because it is money going into the least glamorous and most decisive part of a port economy.
A container terminal moves boxes across a quay. What determines whether a port becomes a regional hub or remains a national gateway is what can be done with the contents once they are ashore: whether cargo can be stored under bond, broken down and recombined into different consignments, held for a customer who has not yet decided where it is going, and re-exported without re-entering the domestic customs system. That work needs buildings, yard space, systems and licences, and it is where margin in the logistics chain accumulates. Jebel Ali's advantage over its neighbours has never been its cranes.
The seven contracts are structured as investments by operators rather than as construction the ports authority is paying for, which is the model Mawani has been using to develop landside capacity across its portfolio. The authority provides the land and the concession; the operator finances, builds and runs the facility and takes the commercial risk on filling it. For the operator, the attraction is a site inside or adjacent to the customs perimeter of the busiest port in the Kingdom, which is not a location that can be replicated on the open market.
Al-Khumra matters here as much as the port itself. A logistics zone set back from the quay can offer larger plots and lower land cost than the port estate while remaining close enough for a short shuttle move, which is the standard arrangement for consolidation and distribution operations that need volume rather than immediate quay access. Splitting the 384,000 square metres between the two locations suggests a mix of uses rather than a single warehouse type.
The commitments come at a point when good-quality industrial space in the Kingdom is scarce. Much of the existing warehouse stock was built for static storage rather than for throughput, and the shortage is concentrated in exactly the modern, high-specification buildings that contract logistics operators and re-export businesses require. Purpose-built space inside a port estate is close to unobtainable on the open market, which is why concessions of this kind attract international bidders as well as domestic ones.
The wider programme is larger again. The National Transport and Logistics Strategy envisages 59 logistics zones across the Kingdom, with the aim of putting Saudi Arabia inside the global top ten for logistics performance. Most of those zones remain to be developed, and the pace at which private operators sign up for them is the practical test of whether the demand assumptions behind the strategy hold.
What the Jeddah contracts establish is that they hold at least at the port. Jeddah handled 4,960,120 containers in 2025, and that volume, concentrated in one place, is what makes a warehouse operator confident about a long lease. The test for the rest of the programme is whether the same case can be made at locations without a port attached.