Outlook for Water Pipes and Construction Materials in Saudi Arabia is Still Positive Says Leading Player in the Market

Interview with Abdullah Alhussain, CEO of Green Pipes Factory (GPF)

What is your overview of the piping sector itself in Saudi Arabia? What are the latest news and how does Green Pipes fit into it?

The overview of the sector, especially with the water pipes and similar materials, is still promising. That is because of the need for housing where a majority of people are looking for new houses, and also government projects and their plans to increase the number of companies to attract people from outside Saudi Arabia. All these decisions attract more building activity which is where we find the need for our materials. Our focus will take advantage of this to attract business and raise our market share. In general, the market is promising and the economy is still growing.

When you mentioned housing, are you mostly working with residential? Do you work with business or factories or government as well?

Our main area is the distribution for residential housing and buildings such as apartments, big buildings, and high towers. Part of our business focuses on polyethylene pipes, which cover the big projects.

Has Vision 2030 pushed you in any different directions or affected your business in any way?

It is pushing us to bring in more manpower and also to have more stocked raw materials. If we complete our production running non-stop, this will give us an opportunity to take the market share and compete in terms of the prices and the volume of our capacity.

What is the history of Green Pipes? What is the philosophy of the business itself?

We have been in business for almost 30 years now. We started as a trading establishment as an agent for a Turkish company with this name. After some time, we gained knowledge and created our standard. Then, we pushed the companies to produce for us under our brand name. So, even though products are manufactured by a third party, we still have our standard and our name on them. That gives us the opportunity to deal with the market, because we are living in this market and we know its needs. We improved ourselves to gain more market share. Later, we saw the opportunity with the government to push for manufacturing that supports people going to their manufacturers. We planned for this and we have been working for almost 20 years with our manufacturer in our factory.

What are your competitive advantages? What makes you stand out from other players in the market?

We have moved through three stages in our business. At the beginning, we were competing in price. We could not enter the market because of the price. Also, we were unknown, so we pushed hard to visit the projects and show them that our product, even if it is a reasonable price, is still high-quality. You can test it yourself, with a pressure test or any kind of hammering, to see that our product will work and will last. After that, we applied our brand name and we started giving after-sales services. We tested houses for people and provided for any third party, even the distributor if they sold it for someone else, to test their houses for free and to apply our guarantee certificate. These things gave us the opportunity to compete and to gain a good market share at that time. Then, we raised prices because of the cost. Generally, we manage between quality and after-sales services with a reasonable price. Many people did not understand our guarantee certificate. We used to have a 50-year warranty from the manufacturer. If the product was defective, they would replace it. But we applied our guarantee certificates for the houses at that time, even if the damage was caused by our defective products causing other problems. We have a complete guarantee for 15 years which is quite unique in the market.

Our product mainly is the green pipes, which are polypropylene pipes, polypropylene copolymer pipes, which is for the water line pipes, and fittings. We have our own drawings and our own standards which we apply with ISO, SASO, WRAS , and other certificates. For three years now, we have been dealing with polyethylene pipes which are HDPE-PE 100 high-density pipes for projects under the surface. We are still very new in this market, but we are in good shape and improving that market share recently.

For the piping systems, there are many other kinds of pipes. For a long time, we were focusing on water pipes, but now we are focusing on other sectors such as electrofusion pipes, electronic pipes, gas pipes, firefighting pipes. This is also new for our market. We are dealing with it step by step. It is very hard to enter a new sector, but we are studying this sector so we will see very soon what is best and we will enter. There is some discussion with international companies, for example, from the US and other countries, to merge lines of our products so it will be joint brand names, but we are still in negotiations.

What are some of your major partners that you currently work with?

We have good relations with SABIC and also Borouge from the UAE. We have other partners from Italy, India, China. We have been running our business with good relations with them for almost 20 years.

What is your three to five-year vision for the company? What would you like to have achieved in the medium term?

We are now pushing ourselves to increase our market share within two to five years. We are planning for an increase to 20 percent of the market share from 15 percent. We have already started on this this year. We launched two branches in the eastern region and the western region. We are looking forward to selling to nearby countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. There are some customers, but we have not dealt with it as a continuous business. We are planning for our company to cover the entire MENA region. We hope we will succeed in this in four years. We are definitely looking not just for internal market share in Saudi, but regional market share as well. Last year, we also opened in the market in Yemen, but it is not very fast-growing. It is still at the beginning of this kind of project. It needs time, maybe more than we planned. We want to focus to serve 20 percent of our market share in Saudi Arabia and if there is any opportunity outside, we will go for it.

What is your inspiration? What drives you to do what you do every day?

Because this is a family business, we would like to support my father’s vision. When I was 13 years old, I would come to this company every day. In the beginning, we had some very difficult times. We could not buy anything. We did not even have a house. We were living in a rental house. My father had a vision he believed in from the beginning. He talked with a Turkish manufacturer at that time and said, “Later, I will manufacture this product and send it to Turkey.” The manufacturer laughed at him and underestimated him. My father had worked in the government sector before, so we were new in the business. From the beginning, he said, “Abdullah, you will not work for anybody. You will work for yourself and you will believe that it is worth it.” We see the value of this organization to cover anything we want in this life and we will continue to do this for our kids. This is part of our life now. We are doing it for them.

ABOUT GREEN PIPES FACTORY: GPF is a manufacturer and exporter of HDPE pipes, PPR pipes, valves and grooved fittings in Saudi Arabia. The company was founded by Mr. Mohammad Bin Abdullah Al Hussien, a businessman with a rich experience in the piping industry, business development and project management within the Gulf region.

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