The local El-Seif Engineering Contracting has been awarded two contracts worth about SR8bn ($2.1bn) for constructing housing and related infrastructure in Jizan in the southwest of Saudi Arabia.

The client for both schemes is the Interior Ministry. Each project will involve building three different towns.

For the first project, with a contract value of about SR4.5bn, the contractor will build 2,400 housing units through a mixture of villas and apartments. The project will also include building shops, clinics, military offices, and the associated utilities infrastructure.

For the second contract, worth about SR3.5bn, the local firm will build 2,100 residential units and similar infrastructure to the first project.

This is the second largest order that El-Seif has received from the kingdom’s Interior Ministry within the last nine months. In June 2014, the contractor was awarded an estimated SR2.5bn deal to build phase 2b of its security compounds network programme, also known as the King Abdullah Project (KAP).

Phase 2b of the programme will involve building various, headquarters, administrative and residential buildings at sites in Hail and Tabuk. This is the second contract that El-Seif was awarded on the scheme, with the local contractor winning the contract to build phase 2a of the project in December.

Packages 2a and 2b were formerly part of the package awarded to the local Saudi Oger in 2011 for the second phase of the KAP security network scheme. The ministry cancelled Oger’s contract in 2012 for undisclosed reasons, and the ministry has retendered the second phase in five packages. The Interior Ministry received bids for phase 2c in October 2014, but has still not awarded the contract.

The Interior Ministry has become an increasingly key client in Saudi Arabia’s construction sector in recent years. Since 2012, the ministry has awarded more than $15bn-worth of construction contracts, 28 per cent of the total SR46bn civil construction deals awarded in the kingdom in that period.

It is not just the KAP programme the Interior Ministry is developing, as it oversees several other major construction schemes. These include its new Jeddah headquarters, for which contractors are due to submit bids on 14 July. In 2013, the ministry awarded $2bn-dollar-plus dollar contracts to the local ABV Rock and Saudi Binladin Group (SBG) to build medical cities in Riyadh and Jeddah.

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