The incredible new £385bn megaproject that will ‘use 20 percent of the world’s steel’ | World | News
The construction of a gigantic mega city in Saudi Arabia currently uses “20 percent of the global steel market”, a spokesperson for the project has claimed.
Neom is a 10,000-square-mile strip of land along the Red Sea coast which has been levelled to create a vast megacity as part of a project launched by the Kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017.
The flagship development well be The Line, a linear smart city 105 miles long with no cars or streets and capacity to house 9 million people.
The project is expected to be completed in 2045, though a 5km central area is projected to be up and running at the end of the decade, according to reports.
It’s part of the Saudi Vision 2030 project announced in 2016, covering an area twice the size of Lebanon, and will also include a dozen luxury resorts, a winter resort, an industrial city called Oxagon and Sindalah, a resort island.
Speaking at the Global Logistics Forum in Riyadh on the weekend of October 13, Neom’s chief investment officer, Manar Al Moneef, said: “Neom is going to be the largest customer [in logistics] over the next decade.
“If you look at our demand in logistics it’s 5 percent of the global logistics market,” she added, in comments quoted by business news outlet Arabian Gulf Business Insight.
“We are 20 percent of the global steel market. If you look at our demand for elevators, cement and so on … Put simply, Neom is going to be the largest customer over the next few decades.”
Though the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia boasts vast oil wealth—estimated to account for around 40 percent of the country’s GDP—it is not a major steel producer.
This means that the metals are likely being sourced in large part from abroad.
In 2022, the top iron & steel exporting nations were China ($69.8B), Germany ($36.9B), Japan ($35.7B), South Korea ($29B), and Indonesia ($28.8B), according to the Observatory of Economic Complexities.
Meanwhile, the top importers were the US ($43.2b), China ($41.4b), Germany ($36b), Italy ($30.2b), and Turkey ($25.6b), according to the
Saudi Arabia imported only 0.98 percent of the global total iron and steel from overseas or $5.53bn worth.
The official cost of building Neom was anticipated to be $500 billion (£385.4bn), though independent analysts estimate the true cost of the project is closer to $1.5 trillion (£1.15 trillion).