Cogs in motion • Chapter summary
For the past few years, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has placed particular emphasis on the industrial sector being the motor through which the country would achieve much of its transformative plans. With the arrival of the pandemic, therefore, there was an urgency in responding as effectively and expeditiously as possible not seen in other sectors. This special approach, respective to other sectors, has much to do with manufacturing. It is worth remembering that manufacturing is to be the backbone of the non-oil economy as laid out in Vision 2030.
So many industrial projects means so many workers and so many families across the country that were at risk from the virus unless proper actions were taken. The speed and attention with which both public entities and private enterprises reacted is a theme that runs throughout this chapter. In the public sphere, the response of the Ministry of Industry, the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, and the Saudi Authority for Industry and Technology Zones (MODON) was instrumental in setting out an approach across industrial sites. As stressed by the Minister of Industry, Bandar Alkhorayef; “In the Saudi Market, everything is available… part of our mission is to continue to work at full capacity.”
The second theme that has been accelerated by the pandemic is the digitalization of processes and operations. The effect of the pandemic, according to the Minister of Industry, was to act as a digital switch. The consequence of this has been to make the sector much more resilient to future shocks whilst also offering up new exciting opportunities in the private sector.
The case of JIPCO serves to illustrate this trend. CEO Heiko Schulze goes into detail how, as an automobile manufacturer, the digitalization of the parts ordering system in response to the pandemic has helped the firm disrupt the sector and position it for expansion. JIPCO is also the beneficiary of “the realization of Saudi’s megaprojects,” reflecting a synergy between public- and private-sector ambitions, one echoed throughout this chapter.
As with the construction and real estate sectors, the industrial sector has largely been unperturbed by the hurdles of the coronavirus. Benefitting from an able government response and the impact in streamlining digital services, the industrial objectives and goals will remain the mainstay of the Kingdom’s ambitions for the foreseeable future.