Alat (Arabic for ‘machines’), the PIF funded $100 billion initiative to create an automated manufacturing hub in Saudi Arabia will invest up to $150 million in partnership with SoftBank.
Soft Bank will partner with Alat to establish a fully automated manufacturing and engineering hub in Riyadh that will serve local and global demand. The first factory is targeted to open in December 2024.
Amit Midha, CEO of Alat, says: “We want this to be the start of a gamechanger for manufacturing around the world. Together with SoftBank Group, we see an immense market opportunity for robotics both in the Kingdom, the Gulf, and globally.
“With this initial set-up, we predict a contribution of 1 billion dollars to Saudi Arabia GDP by 2025. Our ambition is to fundamentally transform industrial manufacturing by robots, manufactured in the Kingdom.”
Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, says: “The combination of Saudi Arabia’s vision, economic growth, and leading logistics location coupled with abundant access to green energy and Alat’s mandate to manufacture sustainably, made this strategic partnership between us very compelling.
“Today’s announcement marks a historic milestone for how future manufacturing will take place.”
The new JV will build industrial robots based on intellectual property developed by SoftBank Group and its affiliates that will perform tasks with minimal additional programming, that are ideally suited for industrial assembly and applications in manufacturing and production.
The robot manufacturing factory that the JV will create in the Kingdom is a lighthouse factory, that will use the latest technology to manufacture unprecedented next generation robots to perform a wide variety of tasks.
Alat is also weighing opportunities to invest in semiconductor manufacturing and is in talks with several potential partners to make its first investment in the industry this year.
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