MANAMA, 21 March 2007 — Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority (SAGIA), Deputy Governor, Dr. Awad bin Saleh Al-Awad, said on Monday that more than 255,000 jobs had been created in the Saudi market as a result of increasing domestic and foreign investment.
Al-Awad, who said that the private sector plays an important and growing role in advancing economic and social development in Saudi Arabia, added that the economic reforms undertaken by the Saudi government in recent years had played a major role in attracting investment.
He pointed out that the balance of foreign investment in Saudi Arabia was in excesses of SR194 billion distributed in a variety of sectors, mainly oil and gas, petrochemicals and energy.
He stressed that the importance of foreign investment was not only limited to their volume, but encompasses the added benefit of rehabilitating and upgrading the skills of Saudi nationals, through training and development programs offered by these companies.
He also said that the benefits of these investments were reflected in the level of salaries and bonuses the workers receive in addition to the introduction of new techniques and added professionalism into the work place.
“Data from the Organization for Social Insurance shows that these foreign investment had succeeded in finding and providing more than 255,000 jobs, including more than 69,000 jobs for Saudis,” he said. More than 27 percent of the jobs in each project went to Saudi nationals, under the Saudization plan.
“The rate of Saudization in many large foreign investment projects exceeds this ratio reaching 80 percent at times,” he said. “All these jobs have average salaries ranging from four thousand to more than SR20,000 a month”.
Al-Awad also said that direct foreign investments helped to significantly increase Saudi Arabia’s nonoil exports with the value of these exports reaching SR71 billion in 2006.
“This accounts for more than a 67 percent increase in the total nonoil exports of Saudi Arabia, making these investments value-added to the gross domestic product (GDP) of more than SR50 billion,” he said.