RIYADH, 8 December 2003 — Despite the outwardly dismal appearance of much of the market in the Kingdom and reports of a steadily decreasing per capita income, there is plenty of liquidity here, and those Saudi executives who can are spending big. Among their toys are private jets like the Bombardier Learjet 45 XR of Canada, which has just gone on display in Riyadh.
It costs a cool $11 million.
“Saudi Arabia accounts for 60 percent of our entire market in the Middle East, with at least 150 private jets in the Kingdom alone,” says Dr. Saad Al-Ahmad, a account manager at ExecuJet Middle East.
The majority of the company’s customers are young Saudi executives whose high purchasing power and growing business activities in the Gulf states combine to make them the largest buyers of these executive jets, Al-Ahmad says.
ExecuJet has just opened a new regional office in the Kingdom, and besides providing maintenance facilities, the company will also set up training programs to help Saudi business executives pilot their own jets.
The Bombardier Learjet 45 XR of Canada can climb to an altitude of 43,000 feet in under 22 minutes and reach a cruising speed up to Mach 0.81 (859 km/hr). It has a maximum range of 2,098 nautical miles and can go on long-haul trips from the Kingdom.
Dr. Al-Ahmad and Khader Mattar, the company’s sales director, said several factors were responsible for the buoyant conditions in the aviation market. The flight of Saudi capital from the US, together with mega hotel and tourism-oriented projects in the Gulf, had created a situation in which young business executives in charge of these projects have to jet back and forth at short notice. “Time is of the essence. For them, jet travel is no longer a luxury but a necessity,” they claim.
Dr. Al-Ahmad believes there is a veritable economic boom going on in the Kingdom. “The first oil boom of the mid-1980s was led by the government. The current boom is led by the private sector, whose enormous resources have jacked up share prices and caused a surge in the construction market.”
This is borne out by the fact that while the private sector registered a 3.5 percent growth this year, growth of the public sector remained sluggish at 1.5 percent, according to the Saudi American Bank’s mid-year appraisal of the Saudi economy.
