I'm joined by Khalid Abdel Mone, and I hope I got that pretty close.
Khalid is the CEO of Aloo and here today at Cityscape Global 2025.
Some big news.
Maybe start off.
Tell us a little bit about the company, and I want to get to this breaking news.
First, thank you for having me.
It's our pleasure.
Alupo is a Saudi company.
We have been here in the market for 50 years.
This year is our 50th.
Congratulations.
Happy anniversary.
Thank you very much.
It started actually with aluminum extrusion, and we became one of the top 10 worldwide.
50% of our business is in Saudi Arabia, and the other 50% is another 26 countries.
Actually we go up to North America, the US and Canada, and we also supply the other side to India, so widely available.
5 years ago we started the diversification journey.
Where we introduced most of the other products that the construction clients requires, so steel work, lights, decorations, wood, what have you, that makes our clients have a one-stop shop scenario.
Instead of looking to too many suppliers, to deal with us, we give them a worry-free or hassle-free journey with the construction journey, and I'm sure that pays many dividends because you take away some of the friction.
And the worries everybody keeps coming back.
Yes, definitely, I'm happy for that.
The customers are happy and we are very happy to serve them.
Yeah, definitely we're looking for more business and this is happening with more satisfaction from the clients.
Well, I alluded to it a little bit earlier, a big announcement.
A house talk about more business, maybe talk about that.
Big announcement today.
Yes, actually, through the journey we look at the construction market.
We analyze where is the bottleneck, and then we create a solution for that bottleneck.
So instead of being a raw materials supplier, we are a solution provider.
When we look at the Saudi Arabia market, we found that the bottleneck in supplying more houses to the market, so there is a requirement of houses, but the supply chain today has lots of bottlenecks around because of the requirement of human resources, the requirement of material, the site work, the aggressiveness of the site during summer.
So we came up with automation of this.
Industry and instead of building that site, we build a factory, so we converted the construction industry from traditional to like a a car industry like by which we do we divide the house into 18 modules.
We use the modules in the factory.
We finalize, finish all of them, and we transport and then we collect them together as a Lego.
So this will actually improve the quality significantly and will be much faster because the site work will be only one week.
Wow, yeah, so one week you will receive the house.
So this is beautiful, definitely.
There is some work in the site, in the manufacturing site, but this is on us because we understand manufacturing.
The beauty where every time we start, we don't start from scratch.
We partner with a global partner.
So we have actually from the US, we are partnered with Array Technologies, which is NASDAQ listed.
We're partner with Metex Applied, which is NASDAQ also a listed company, into a joint venture in Saudi Arabia market to bring solutions.
This time we went to the other side.
We partnered with Aloha from China.
Because they are actually one of the fastest automation process, and we're creating a company in Saudi Arabia.
The capital is $500 million US dollars to build a factory in Riyadh that will supply around 1000 to 1500 houses per year, per year.
Yeah, that's quite substantial filling the, the demand side.
Yeah, and maybe, uh, Khaleen, if you can share with us a little bit, given your global perspective, what you're seeing, uh, from local markets to international markets on the demand side for housing.
The demand for housing is something that's always happening because the population is growing.
Actually, my kids yesterday were in school, now actually ready to get married and ready to actually live by themselves, so the requirement of housing is coming.
All along and everybody is looking for modern housing, new designs, and so on.
So in Canada, in the US, in Saudi Arabia, it's the same behavior.
There is more population and more housing requirement, and a lot of them require more modern designs.
So in Saudi Arabia, the Vision 2030 with Prince Mohammed, actually, he started the journey of ownership.
Because, because there was little actually ownership of houses in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the people lived in rented houses.
So growing this to the 85% was a challenge that the government actually looked at and the vision was explaining this to everybody.
Now the deficit became very obvious to everybody.
You see here a lot of developers are coming up with solutions to help in this deficit fulfilling.
We are playing our part as suppliers to get a solution that will automate, give higher quality, and give faster solutions than the traditional ones.
Excellent.
Well, Khalid, thank you so much for joining us today.
We appreciate you sharing all your perspective and experience with us today.
Thank you very much.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
