Saudi industrial output rises 1.5% in May on mining, manufacturing gains: GASTAT
Updated 10 July 2025
Nirmal Narayanan
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s industrial production expanded 1.5 percent year on year in May, driven by growth in mining, quarrying, and manufacturing activities, official data showed.
The Industrial Production Index reached 108.8 in May, rising 2.5 percent from April, according to preliminary figures from the General Authority for Statistics.
The latest IPI figure, reflecting continued growth in the manufacturing sector, underscores Saudi Arabia’s progress in its economic diversification efforts aimed at reducing its decades-long reliance on crude revenues.
In its latest release, GASTAT stated: “Preliminary results indicate a 1.5 percent increase in the Industrial Production Index in May 2025 compared to the same month of the previous year, supported by the rise in mining and quarrying activity, manufacturing activity and water supply, sewerage and waste management and remediation activities.”
The release further added that the index of oil activities saw an annual rise of 0.5 percent in May, while non-oil activities increased by 3.8 percent.
In May, another report released by GASTAT revealed that the Kingdom’s gross domestic product grew by 2.7 percent year on year in the first quarter, driven by strong non-oil activity.
Commenting on the GDP figures at the time, Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal Al-Ibrahim, who also chairs GASTAT’s board, noted that the contribution of non-oil activities to the Kingdom’s economic output reached 53.2 percent — an increase of 5.7 percent from previous estimates.
According to the latest GASTAT report, the sub-index of manufacturing activities increased by 0.9 percent year on year in May.
This growth was driven by an increase in the manufacture of chemicals and chemical products, which rose by 14 percent, and the manufacture of food products, which increased by 3.2 percent.
GASTAT added that the sub-index of mining and quarrying activity rose by 2.1 percent compared to the same month of the previous year.
“Saudi Arabia increased its oil production to 9.18 million barrels per day in May 2025 compared to 8.99 million barrels per day in May 2024,” added GASTAT.
The report further noted that electricity, gas, steam, and air conditioning supply activity recorded an annual decrease of 7.7 percent in May, while water supply, sewerage, and waste management and remediation operations rose by 15.5 percent during the same period.
On a monthly basis, manufacturing activity in Saudi Arabia increased by 2.3 percent, supported by growth in the production of coke and refined petroleum products, which rose by 1.9 percent.
Compared to April, mining and quarrying activities in Saudi Arabia also increased by 2 percent in May.
Overall, oil activities rose by 2 percent in May compared to the previous month, while non-oil activities increased by 3.9 percent during the same period.
Innovation is helping AI understand the region’s language, culture, and voice
Updated 06 November 2025
Nada Hameed
JEDDAH: As developers across the Arab world work to formalize Arabic for artificial intelligence — grappling with its many dialects, limited datasets, and deep cultural nuance — English-based AI systems have continued to surge ahead. Now, industry experts say it’s time for Arabic users to gain the same technological momentum.
The performance gap between Arabic and English natural language processing is most visible in speech recognition, where pronunciation, rhythm, and vocabulary differ sharply across dialects. These variations make it challenging for one model to understand spoken Arabic with consistent accuracy.
Despite these hurdles, progress is accelerating. With rising investment and government-backed initiatives led by Saudi Arabia and other regional powers, Arabic AI is steadily closing in on English in sophistication and accessibility.
As Arabic AI evolves, experts emphasize the importance of cultural nuance and dialect diversity in future language models. (aramcoworld.com)
Amsal Kapetanovic, head of KSA at Infobip, told Arab News: “While written NLP tasks like basic chatbots can be managed with additional work, speech recognition really exposes the limitations of current models. It requires even more fine-tuning and adaptation to handle the diversity of spoken Arabic effectively. This is where the gap between Arabic and English NLP is most pronounced.”
Infobip’s recent collaborations with telecom and private sector partners across the Gulf reveal a similar pattern: Arabic chatbots and virtual assistants often require greater oversight in their early stages than English systems. However, once they are retrained using region-specific conversational data and Gulf dialects, both accuracy and customer satisfaction rise sharply.
Arabic remains one of AI’s greatest linguistic challenges. Unlike English, it is not a single unified language but a family of dialects stretching from Asia to Africa. Its complex morphology — with prefixes, suffixes, gender and number agreement, and the absence of short-vowel diacritics — poses major obstacles for tokenization and model training.
Kapetanovic referenced a 2025 study published in JMIR Medical Informatics (“InfectA-Chat: An Arabic Large Language Model for Infectious Diseases”), which tested instruction-tuned models like GPT-4 in both English and Arabic. The research found that Arabic models still trail English by 10–20 percent in complex tasks.
“Arabic models still lag slightly behind English ones, particularly in areas like accuracy and sentiment analysis,” he said. “This is primarily due to the smaller size of Arabic training datasets and the complexity of Arabic dialects.”
He added: “Arabic itself is a family of languages and dialects — much richer and more complex than many others. This diversity adds another layer of challenge.”
Amsal Kapetanović, head of KSA unit at Infobip. (Supplied)
Yet optimism remains strong. “The good news is that there is significant investment happening, especially in the MENA region, with countries like Saudi Arabia leading the way,” Kapetanovic said. “Initiatives like Vision 2030 are accelerating progress, and we’re seeing more focus on localizing AI for Arabic speakers.”
Speech recognition continues to represent the most visible gap. “A Lebanese speaker and a Saudi speaker might use different words and speak at different speeds, making it challenging for a single model to recognize and process spoken Arabic accurately,” he said.
Localization, Kapetanovic explained, extends far beyond translation. “At Infobip, we are defining the evolution of communications in co-creation with our customers and partners throughout the region. Gartner has recognized us as a Leader in their 2025 Magic Quadrant for CPaaS. We are committed to delivering the next generation of AI-powered customer conversations to unlock seamless, high-impact engagement for MENA businesses. That’s why we put a strong emphasis on localizing our AI-driven platforms and tools to serve Arabic-speaking users effectively.”
Technical, cultural, and ethical challenges shape the future of Arabic AI, as developers strive for inclusion and linguistic parity. (aramcoworld.com)
Real-world applications are already bearing fruit. “For example, Nissan Saudi Arabia rolled out a WhatsApp chatbot (‘Kaito’) that handles customer queries in both Arabic and English,” he said. “These bots leverage Infobip’s Answers platform, which includes built-in NLP capabilities for Arabic — such as right-to-left text support and Arabic stop-word recognition — to interpret queries and intent.”
“For Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, we’ve gone beyond simple translation by implementing features and partnerships tailored to the region,” he continued.
“We’ve partnered with Lucidia, a leading Saudi tech company, to co-develop solutions that address local business needs and integrate with popular regional channels like WhatsApp and X.”
“We’ve also built language models that recognize Gulf-specific dialects and cultural expressions, making our chatbots and automation tools more intuitive for users. Additionally, our platform supports local payment integrations and business workflows unique to the region. These initiatives reflect our commitment to delivering genuinely localized technology, not just Arabic language support.”
DID YOU KNOW?
• Saudi Arabia is leading investment in Arabic AI, with Vision 2030 initiatives.
• AI can become biased and exclusionary if it does not speak or understand Arabic well.
• Infobip’s Arabic chatbots now ‘think’ in Gulf dialects, improving accuracy.
Cultural understanding, he added, is key to truly human-like AI. “Culturally aware AI should ideally be AI that understands the why behind the what,” he said. “It’s about deep research and understanding the background — not just giving straight answers to straight questions.”
“At Infobip, we integrate with multiple large language models and do so in an agnostic way,” he said. “We combine them and see which ones serve which purpose, giving us the flexibility to avoid pitfalls like AI hallucination or unwanted replies.”
The ethics of language and inclusion
Kapetanovic cautioned that neglecting Arabic in AI development poses not only technical risks but ethical ones.
“The ethical risk is that AI can become biased and exclusionary if it doesn’t speak or understand Arabic well,” he said. “If AI systems don’t handle certain languages or dialects properly, or if they lack enough regional data, they can exclude parts of the narrative or reinforce bias.”
“It’s essential for everyone in the AI ecosystem to contribute to making AI as inclusive and democratized as possible. Otherwise, we risk reinforcing disparities in services, information, and opportunities.”
