Riyadh: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources on Friday announced its investment of $6 billion in a steel plate complex and a factory for electric car battery metals. This comes as a part of the kingdom’s plans to attract $32 billion in investment in the mining sector, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
Industry and Mineral Resources Minister Bandar Al-Khorayef in a statement said that the ministry’s goal is to finance nine projects for minerals and metals.
These projects will provide more than 14,500 job opportunities, and the ministry will begin evaluating 145 exploration license applications from foreign companies.
The nine projects include a steel plate mill complex worth $4 billion, to help develop shipbuilding projects, oil, gas, construction and defense sectors.
In addition, the kingdom plans to develop a green steel complex; in order to provide supplies to the automotive, equipment, food packaging, machinery and other industrial sectors.
The ministry said that the two projects are underway, along with a $2 billion electric car battery metal factory.
In addition to these investments, on April 26, 2022, the Saudi government signed an agreement with Lucid Luxury Electric Vehicles Company, to purchase nearly 100,000 electric vehicles over a period of 10 years.
Diversification of the economy
Saudi Arabia is making huge efforts to diversify the oil-dependent economy significantly, and the world’s view of Riyadh has changed after its strategic shift towards the discovery and extraction of minerals and metals.
Saudi Arabia has drawn up a plan within Vision 2030 launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to pump hundreds of billions of dollars to diversify the economy away from oil.
