$203m Neom catering contract goes to Alhokair

Reuters/CNBC

• Contract awarded by Alfanar
• Deal covers residential complex
• Part of SAR10bn project

A contract worth SAR760 million ($203 million) to provide catering services at the futuristic city Neom in northwest Saudi Arabia has been awarded to the Saudi hotel operator Abdulmohsen Alhokair Group for Tourism and Development. 

Alhokair, which runs 92 entertainment centres and 35 hotels in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, said in a statement on the Saudi stock market site Tadawul on Monday, January 22, that the contract was awarded in December by Alpha Facilities Contracting Co., an affiliate of the Saudi project developer Alfanar Group, to provide catering services at a residential complex in Neom.

The hotel operator gave no more details. 

• Neom launches ‘futuristic’ project on Aqaba coast
• Neom secures $5.6bn to expand workforce housing
• Neom sets up company to work on Saudi food security

Alfanar says on its website that it is designing, building, financing, operating and maintaining five “sustainable residential communities” in different parts of the Neom region, including Oxagon city, which has been marketed as an industrial city. 

The developer, which set up a London-based subsidiary last year, says the five-community project is worth SAR10 billion and will house 50,000 people. 

Neom, the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and the biggest of the giga-projects at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s vast economic diversification plan, has unrolled a series of tourist projects over the past two years, the most recent being a luxury marina in the Gulf of Aqaba called Aquellum. 

That came after a series of announcements about other projects including Leyja, a new tourism destination in Northwest Saudi Arabia; Utamo, an events space on a mountain by the Gulf of Aqaba; and Norlana, a “lifestyle community” with a 120-berth superyacht marina. Neom also made a rash of patent applications to US authorities in 2023 for project names and logos. 

However, information about Neom’s main development, a 170km-long concept city called The Line, has been scant. A video released in October showed foundational work laying out the path of the city through an empty desert.