Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is leading an economic diversification program to reduce the kingdom's dependence on oil revenues and create jobs, announced a transport and logistics strategy, revealing few details. From last Tuesday.
According to Reuters, the Minister of Transport, Saleh bin Nasser Al-Jasser, told a press conference in Saudi Arabia that the strategy includes many giant projects and allocates more than 500 billion riyals for investment.
This strategy is the latest economic policy to put Saudi Arabia in competition with the United Arab Emirates, the center of business, trade and tourism in the region.
Abdulaziz Al-Duailej, head of the Civil Aviation Authority, said at the same conference that Saudi Arabia plans to increase the number of international flight routes from 99 to more than 250 and to increase the total annual passenger traffic to More than tripling from 103 million in 2019 to 330 million by 2030.
The kingdom's international network is currently significantly smaller than that of its smaller neighbors the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which have large hubs for air passenger traffic.
Al-Duailej said the annual capacity of Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport and King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah would both be expanded to 100 million passengers, but did not give a date.
He added that the Kingdom aims to become a global logistics center for air freight, handling 4.5 million tons of air cargo annually, up from 900,000 tons in 2019.
