Ayman Asfari, the CEO of UK-based oil and gas services group Petrofac, says high spending by national oil companies (NOC) in the Middle East is expected to continue despite low oil prices and talks of a crude production freeze.

Strong spending from NOCs such as Saudi Aramco and Kuwait Oil Corporation (KPC) has helped offset a downturn in investment by international oil companies (IOCs), Asfari said, after announcing Petrofac’s first-half financial results.

Petrofac is heavily focused on the Middle East and has been one of the most successful engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors in the regional oil sector over the past decade in terms of awards value.

The company reported a “strong bidding pipeline” for new EPC contracts and a business backlog worth $17.4bn.

Opec oil ministers are planning to meet at a conference in Algiers in late September to discuss the possibility of freezing production to boost prices.

“If they freeze, they will be freezing at record production levels and they need to continue spending a lot to keep production at those levels,” Asfari told the UK’s Financial Times.

EPC spending in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) oil and gas sector has held up since the drop in oil prices from mid-2014, according to regional projects tracker MEED Projects.

Contract awards in the Mena region excluding Iran and Turkey totalled $47bn in 2015 and $60bn in 2014, compared with an average of about $33bn in the 2011-13 period.

In the first eight months of 2016, contract awards have totalled about $24bn – in line with the average spending over the past five years.

Petrofac booked a net profit of $12m for the first half of 2016, compared with a net loss of $182m in the same period last year. The figure included a charge of $101m on the Laggan-Tormore offshore gas project in the UK, the final charge on a project hit by weather-related delays and industrial action.