One Team Korea
Hyundai Construction has succeeded in securing a plant construction project in Saudi Arabia worth 6.5 trillion won (US$5.0 billion). It is the seventh overseas contract in its history and the largest project ever secured in Saudi Arabia. This accomplishment is seen as a concrete result of the agreement made during the visit of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, to South Korea in November last year. The Crown Prince and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol had agreed to expand cooperation on mega-sized projects.
On June 25, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport and Hyundai Construction announced, “Hyundai Construction and Saudi state-owned oil company Aramco have signed a contract for the US$5 billion Amiral petrochemical plant project.”
The Amiral Project is the largest scale petrochemical plant construction project in Saudi Arabia, led by Aramco and French oil company Total in the Jubail region of eastern Saudi Arabia. Jubail is symbolic as it is where the former Hyundai Construction President, Chung Ju-yung, started writing the Middle Eastern saga by securing the construction of Jubail Industrial Port through aggressive bidding in 1976. The contract amount of US$960 million at that time was equivalent to a quarter of South Korea’s annual budget.
The Amiral Project won by Hyundai Construction this time involves building production facilities that utilize low-value byproducts such as naphtha and ethane produced during oil refining to produce basic chemical products such as ethylene and propylene. Hyundai Construction secured Packages 1 and 4 of the project, which was divided into a total of four packages. Package 1 includes the construction of the Mixed Feed Cracker (MFC), a facility producing 1.65 million tons of ethylene annually, which is considered the “rice of the chemical industry.” Package 4 includes the construction of major infrastructure such as storage facilities and shipping facilities. Packages 2 and 3 were secured by an Italian company.
An industry insider said, “Following the meeting between the Crown Prince and President Yoon last November, there have been ongoing discussions about large-scale business deals at a high level between the two countries.” A combined public-private sector team called One Team Korea, led by Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Won Hee-ryong, has been dispatched to Saudi Arabia three times so far.