Wires and Cables Industry in Saudi Arabia: Discussing the Future of Bahra Electric with Talal Idriss

Talal Idriss, CEO of Bahra Electric, a leading player in the wires and cables industry in Saudi Arabia also known as Bahra Cables, shares his vision for the future of the company.

“We see ourselves as a localization partner. We start with all the electrical products. For our 10 projects currently, we will localize all of them under electrical. Then we will start looking at the gray areas that are electrical and something else. Lighting for example, is not 100% part of the heavy electrical that we do, but it is something we will build. Those projects are not profitable from the first year. Some of them take five, six years to become profitable, because maybe they are new to the market. But eventually, they all hopefully turn profitable as we go along. It is a long road. But we believe electric wires and cables is the basic business, around that is 10 existing projects, and around that is another 20 projects that are being studied with some of them closer to fruition than others. That is our strategy. Our plan is to also work with the big companies such as Schneider, Legrand, Boeing, Airbus to develop not the full product, but to develop some elements in their product range that we can call local and make them more efficient to use local products. The policy and the strategy are very clear: localize everything you can can localize and become more technical – instead of localizing a simple product, localize a more difficult product – and as you build your expertise in extrusion, injection, aluminum, copper, wood, and you get more comfortable developing products that are more difficult to develop and sell them to different countries. For example, we have a project with a German company where they have become inefficient in their country because of costs, etc. They give us the technology and we sell them part of that product for them to use, and they concentrate on another product range. That kind of deal is very possible. We are very internationally motivated. We have a team that travels with all the official government trips, whether it is Uzbekistan, Johannesburg, Madrid, etc. Every two weeks, we have a trip headed by a minister. We believe those connections we gain are the start of the relationship that we build on to build more products”, says Talal Idriss.

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