Saudi Aramco supplier registration for ATEX and hazardous-area equipment

Selling hazardous-area equipment into Saudi Arabia means passing three gates that have almost nothing to do with each other. The country has to let the product in, which is SASO and the SABER platform. The regulator has to approve the radio inside it, which is CST. And the operator has to accept the item onto its own approved materials list, which is Aramco, and which is where most of the elapsed time goes. Clearing one of the three tells you nothing about the other two. A device can be fully SABER-cleared, sitting in a warehouse in Dammam, and still be unusable on an Aramco site because the materials organisation has never listed it.

This guide covers Saudi Aramco supplier registration from the point of view of an equipment manufacturer rather than a services contractor, because the two are read differently. It also covers the two national gates that run alongside it, since a supplier who sequences them one after another rather than in parallel adds months to market entry for no reason.

Registering on the Aramco e-Marketplace

Aramco runs supplier registration on SAP Ariba, branded as the Aramco e-Marketplace, and the entry point depends on where your company is located. There is a self-registration route for companies inside the Kingdom, a separate regional portal covering the GCC, the wider Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, and, for the rest of the world, a route through the relevant Aramco affiliate: Aramco Americas, Aramco Europe or the Asia company. Choosing the wrong entry point does not usually stop an application, but it does slow it down while it is redirected, so start on Aramco’s own become a supplier page and follow the link that matches your registered address.

Registration produces a supplier record. It does not produce business, and Aramco says so plainly: registering does not guarantee future business. What it does is make you addressable.

The document set for an in-Kingdom entity is substantial and largely governmental: commercial registration certificate, industrial licence for manufacturers, investment licence where applicable, zakat certificate, VAT certificate, GOSI certificate, civil defence licence, chamber of commerce membership, and government classification for service providers. Aramco adds its own layer on top: acknowledgement of the suppliers’ code of conduct, a bank reference letter, a company ownership profile, an authorised signatory letter, a Jadeer certificate for small and medium enterprises, and a cybersecurity compliance certificate.

That last item is worth flagging for anyone selling a connected device. A supplier providing hardware that will hold corporate data, enrol into an enterprise mobility platform and sit on a plant network should expect its cybersecurity posture to be examined as a supply chain question, not merely as a product feature. Have your answers ready on secure boot, update policy, vulnerability disclosure and end of support before you are asked.

Prequalification and the 9COM materials world

For a manufacturer, registration is the beginning. What actually matters is getting the item onto the approved vendor list against a materials classification, and this is the part of the Aramco process that suppliers outside the Kingdom find least intuitive.

Aramco separates materials it intends to stock, held under the 9CAT classification, from general commodity materials that are not stocked by Aramco or a local distributor, held under 9COM. A supplier approved against a 9COM classification receives an identifier and becomes eligible to be invited to quote for that commodity. Catalogue details for general commodity items are uploaded by the supplier through the self-service system reached from the vendor portal, subject to enrichment and buyer approval, which means the quality of your own product data has a direct effect on whether a buyer can find and specify your item.

Underneath all of it sits Aramco’s own technical corpus. Engineering requirements are set out in the Saudi Aramco Engineering Standards, and material requirements in the Saudi Aramco Materials System Specifications, the SAMSS series. These are frequently more demanding than the international standards they build on, and Aramco material requisitions reference them directly. For a supplier this has one overriding implication: your technical submission is not assessed against your own datasheet, it is assessed against a specification written by the buyer, and the correct first question in any Aramco conversation is which specification applies to this item. Expect the technical query and material inspection request processes to feature, and expect third-party inspection to be a possibility rather than a surprise.

Approval is not permanent. Vendors are expected to renew qualification periodically and to keep certificates and company information current on the platform, and a lapsed certificate quietly removes you from the invitation list without anybody telling you.

How iktva is scored into evaluation

Iktva, in-Kingdom total value add, is Aramco’s localisation programme, and it is the commercial multiplier sitting on top of the technical process. Every registered supplier is expected to participate, to submit an iktva return and to have the data verified by a third party approved for the purpose. Returns are annual.

The mechanics are a ratio. The published calculation aggregates localised goods and services, salaries paid to Saudi nationals, training and development of Saudi nationals, supplier development spend and local research and development, then divides that total by the relevant revenue base and expresses the result as a percentage. In plain terms it measures how much of the money Aramco pays you stays in the Saudi economy.

Two consequences follow for a foreign equipment manufacturer. The first is that your iktva score at entry will be low, because the formula is measuring a Saudi cost base you do not yet have, and that is normal rather than disqualifying. The second is that the score is improvable through decisions you control: where spares are held, who performs service and repair, whether Saudi technicians are trained and by whom, and whether any part of assembly, configuration or kitting happens in the Kingdom. A device supplier has more localisation options than it usually realises, because device fleets generate service, configuration and support work over years rather than a single shipment.

Aramco does not publish a single evaluation weighting that applies to every tender, so treat any specific percentage you read as unverified and check the tender documents. The structural point holds regardless: between two compliant offers, iktva is one of the things that separates them, and a supplier who has never filed a return is not in the comparison at all.

SABER and SASO: the import gate

National conformity is a different regime with a different clock, and it is the one that decides whether a consignment clears customs.

Regulated products entering Saudi Arabia are registered on SABER, the electronic conformity platform operated under the supervision of the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organization as part of the Saudi product safety programme. SABER connects importers, SASO-approved conformity bodies and the customs authorities in one system, and it issues two distinct certificates that suppliers routinely confuse.

• The product certificate of conformity is issued per product model against the applicable technical regulation and is typically valid for a year.
• The shipment certificate of conformity is issued per consignment and is what customs actually releases against.

Two practical notes. The SABER account belongs to the importer of record, which for most foreign manufacturers means the Saudi partner or subsidiary, so the entity that will hold your Saudi business needs to exist before the first shipment rather than after the first order. And the certificate scope has to match the product as it is actually shipped, including accessories and chargers, because a mismatch is discovered at the border rather than at the desk. Confirm current validity periods and the applicable technical regulation for your category directly on SABER, since scopes are revised.

CST radio approval

Because a phone is a radio, it needs approval from the Communications, Space and Technology Commission. CST is the body formerly known as the Communications and Information Technology Commission; the name changed in December 2022, and a good deal of published material, including some consultancy guidance, still says CITC. If a document or an agent quotes CITC to you today, that is not necessarily wrong in substance, but it is a signal about how current their information is.

CST type approval covers radio equipment placed on the Saudi market, with the technical basis drawn from recognised international radio equipment requirements, and testing does not have to be performed in Saudi laboratories. For a device already approved in Europe, this is generally an administrative exercise built on existing test evidence rather than a new test campaign, but it is a separate submission with its own timeline and it is not covered by SABER.

What an Ex device dossier needs

Aramco assesses hazardous-area equipment on the certificate, not the brochure. Three things belong in the pack, indexed and in one document rather than scattered across an email chain.

• The IECEx Certificate of Conformity. This is the primary technical evidence for hazardous-area equipment in Saudi Arabia and the document the instrumentation or electrical authority will read.
• The ATEX certificate and the complete marking string, plus the EU and UK declarations of conformity where they exist. The marking string is the part that gets checked: equipment group and category, gas or dust, protection concept, gas group, temperature class and equipment protection level.
• The certified ambient temperature range. This is the Saudi-specific point that trips up devices designed for temperate markets. Open plant in the Eastern Province sits above 45 degrees Celsius for months, well outside the reference ambient many certificates assume. If your certificate is silent or restrictive on ambient, expect that to become the whole conversation.

Two further points shape a Saudi specification. Dust is not an afterthought: phosphate and aluminium processing at Ras Al Khair, and fertiliser and polymer handling at Jubail and Yanbu, put Zone 21 alongside Zone 1, so a gas-only device covers half of an integrated complex. And for projects written to the American code rather than the IEC scheme, expect NEC 500 Class I Division 1 to be the reference instead, which is a different certification exercise on the same hardware.

Finally, be clear in your own documentation about protection concept. A buyer searching for an explosion proof mobile phone or a flameproof mobile phone is, for a handheld device, almost always describing an intrinsically safe product with an Ex ib protection level. Using the search term in your marketing is fine; using it in your technical submission where the certificate says something else is not.

What stalls Aramco registrations

1. A missing or incomplete government document set, most often civil defence, GOSI or chamber membership, submitted piecemeal instead of as a pack.
2. Registering through the wrong regional entry point for the company’s registered address.
3. Technical submissions written against the supplier’s datasheet rather than against the applicable Aramco specification.
4. No iktva return filed, or a return filed without approved third-party verification.
5. Certificates allowed to lapse on the platform after approval, which removes a supplier from invitation lists silently.
6. An Ex certificate whose certified ambient range or zone coverage does not match the areas the device is actually being proposed for.

Published timelines vary widely and depend almost entirely on document readiness and whether a Saudi legal entity already exists. Advisers commonly describe several months for a foreign company to complete registration and prequalification. Treat that as indicative only and confirm current requirements, fees and processing times directly with Aramco and with SABER before building a launch plan around them.

Specifying the device itself

The Kingdom’s classified-area workforce is concentrated in the Eastern Province, with a second cluster on the Red Sea coast. The demand pattern is consistent: operators walking well and flowline rounds at Ghawar and Khurais; turnaround crews at Ras Tanura and Abqaiq where the contractor population multiplies for a few weeks; remote assets such as Shaybah where a failed handset is a truck journey rather than a walk to stores; and the integrated complexes at Jubail and Yanbu where gas and dust sit in the same plant.

Buyers reach that requirement through search terms rather than certification codes. Enquiries arrive as explosion proof mobile phone, ATEX mobile phone, ATEX phone, ex phone, zone 1 mobile phone, and most often as some version of explosion proof mobile phone price in Saudi Arabia. Underneath the loose vocabulary the requirement is exact: a handset that can be carried into a Zone 1 area with a certificate behind it, that survives an Eastern Province summer, that runs Arabic and English on the same build, and that enrols into the enterprise mobility platform the telecoms team already operates. Our Saudi Arabia market page sets out that operating context in detail, and the neighbouring United Arab Emirates page covers the ADNOC side of the same buying pattern.

SAMS Mobile is a United Kingdom registered company developing the IS-04Z1, an Android handset designed for Zone 1 and Zone 21 with an ATEX marking target of II 2 G Ex ib IIC T4. IECEx, ATEX and NEC 500 Class I Division 1 certification are in progress and the device launches in Q4 2026. We are not an Aramco registered supplier and make no claim to be. If you are preparing a Saudi specification now, the datasheet and the written certification schedule are available on request, and evaluation units can be arranged ahead of launch.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

• IECEx scheme
• European Commission: ATEX equipment