DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabian National Tire Co. (NTC) has struck a deal with South Korea's Samsung Engineering for the engineering, procurement and construction of its planned $1.6 billion tire plant in Saudi Arabia.
Farid Dudin, general manager of Victoria Trading FZCO and project leader, told European Rubber Journal, a sister publication of Tire Business, that the scope of the project has been expanding from the original $1 billion investment announced in January.
NTC plans to build the factory, which will be rated at 20 million units a year capacity, in Jubail, an industrial city in the eastern part of the kingdom on the Persian Gulf. It i's expected to start production by year-end 2020, with staffing of about 4,000 employees.
Earlier this year NTC said it had signed an agreement on the turnkey concept design with Finnish engineering consulting firm Black Donuts Engineering Inc., covering both the design of the factory itself and the design and development of the plant's products.
NTC is an initiative of Fahad Bin Abdul-Rahman Bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family.