Riyadh – Saudi power company Alfanar is seeking out business in Brazil. The company’s industrial complex (pictured above) comprises a 700,000-square-meter area outside Riyadh, where it produces a wide range of items for electric power distribution and control, lightning, electric switches and plugs, wire and cables, transformers, and even molds to manufacture these products, which are used domestically as well as sold to others. ANBA visited its facilities last week with executives of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce.
The company also has a construction division that designs and carries out works in power generation, transmission and distribution, water treatment, civil construction, in addition to projects of wind and solar power as well as other renewable sources.
Outside Saudi Arabia, the company has plants in the United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, India, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Spain, as well as projects in several other countries.
“And we’re looking for opportunities in Brazil,” the group’s Engineering Services Studies and Sales executive manager engineer Sattam Al-Motairi told ANBA. He welcomed the Arab Chamber delegation to the plant together with General Relations manager Turki Homaidan Ali Al Turki and Sales engineer Omar Alattar.
Aiming at prospecting business in Brazil, the executive visited the Arab Chamber’s stand at WETEX, the water, energy, tech and environment show that took place in Dubai, UAE last month, and so came the opportunity for a visit. The Arab Chamber team was in Riyadh accompanying president Jair Bolsonaro’s visit.
Al-Motairi explained that the company seeks out business in several fronts in Brazil, from manufacturing products in partnership with local companies to turnkey building projects where the building company takes full responsibility for the works, as well as project maintenance and execution services in renewable power industry, especially wind, solar and waste transformation power. Alfanar is already in talks with some Brazilian companies.
In countries where it has subsidiaries, the company purchased local companies not only to have plants abroad but to transfer technology to the parent company. “We purchased, brought the know-how back to Saudi Arabia and took our technology to the subsidiary as well,” said Al-Motairi.
Alfanar was established in the late 1970s as a power product trading company. Now it employs around 20,000 people, including 2,000 engineers.
The Arab Chamber visit included president Rubens Hannun, Foreign Relations vice president Osmar Chohfi, secretary-general Tamer Mansour, Institutional Relations manager Fernanda Baltazar and the head of the Chamber’s international office in Dubai, Rafael Solimeo.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
