3rd Saudi megaprojects conference to explore investment opportunities

The 3rd Saudi Mega Transport & Infrastructure Conference will be held on Sept. 16-17 at Al Faisaliah Hotel in Riyadh, head of the organizing committee and Secretary General of the King Abdullah Initiative for Green Building, Faisal Al-Fadl, said. The conference is part of the drive to support the Kingdom’s efforts to promote the nonoil sector.
There is a growing need to establish a culture of managements for megaprojects with the global project management industry increasingly looking toward Saudi Arabia for business growth. The sector allows leading public and private sector project management firms to focus their attention on employment and investment opportunities in the region’s largest construction market.
Al-Fadl said that the event’s keynote address will be delivered by Minister of Economy and Planning Muhammad Al-Jasser. Other speakers will highlight the opportunities emerging in the Kingdom’s large-scale projects market.
They include Saudi Aramco’s plan to invest $40 billion a year over the next decade to keep oil production capacity steady and double gas production.
According to Al-Fadl, representatives of the world’s major project management companies believe that the Kingdom’s project market continues to be highly attractive. “It is an exciting, challenging and rapidly growing entity,” he said.
However, the resurgence of large-scale and complex projects and programs being developed in the GCC region continues to present delivery challenges to the mega project industry.
Part of the overall holistic solution is to implement tailored programs in management methodologies for mega project delivery with strategic level integrated teams comprising project owners, sponsors and world class delivery professionals.
“To ensure successful delivery, we need to ensure that the best global practices, procedures and systems are both brought and then tailored to the market and implanted. Further, with the rapid rise of major programs we need to develop intelligent procurement as the supply stretches and capacity is taken up by multiple mega programs running concurrently, Al-Fadl said.
The two-day conference is being organized by MEED and supported by the King Saud Foundation. A total of more than 80 megaprojects, each worth at least $1 billion, are under way or planned for completion by 2030. This makes the Kingdom the Middle East’s largest megaproject market by a wide margin, according to MEED data.