British newspaper: Saudi Arabia continues to buy weapons despite its economic crisis

Quoted from the official YPA that the Britain’s Financial Times said on Sunday in a report that Saudi Arabia is still keen to buy weapons despite its suffocating economic crisis.

According to officials of international manufacturing companies that their sales have not witnessed a decline in spending by major customers in the Middle East, including the Kingdom.
The newspaper stressed that two days after Riyadh announced austerity measures, the defense wing of the American Boeing Company was awarded contracts worth $ 2.6 billion to provide the Kingdom with more than 1,000 surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles.

The Financial Times also quoted experts as saying that the aforementioned arms sales are part of long-term agreements, and that it is evidence that one of the world’s largest arms importers is still spending on defense, referring to Saudi Arabia.

In turn, Lockheed Martin, the US arms maker that equips Riyadh with missile defense systems, “THAAD”, has reported that “it has not seen a decline in defense spending by any of its major clients in the Middle East.”
“It is too early to know if budgetary pressures will pass into the defense sector,” said Robert Harwar, CEO of Lockheed Martin in the Middle East, but he expected the company’s clients, including Saudi Arabia, to continue their purchases.

The British newspaper also quoted another executive in a Gulf arms manufacturer, which it did not name, that his company had “not witnessed any shift in attitudes from clients.”
Analysts expected that the sale of new weapons, expensive, some restrictions, if it is necessary to make cuts, according to the “Financial Times.”

For its part, the Saudi Ministry of Finance assured the newspaper that the kingdom will continue to support its military needs and will spare no resources to defend its people and land.

The ministry said it is working to rationalize spending. To ensure that the Kingdom obtains defense equipment “at the appropriate cost, for the appropriate quantity and specifications”.
It is noteworthy that the military expenditures for Saudi Arabia in 2019 amounted to 198 billion Saudi riyals ($ 52.8 billion), a decrease of 18.3% from 2018.

Riyadh attributed this decline to “improved procurement and planning” rather than a decrease in funding.
While independent analysts said, Saudi Arabia’s spending on defense in 2019 “was in fact much higher,” according to the same source.

These data are announced at a time when the Saudis have started a new phase of austerity, due to recent government measures that stipulate increasing the tax and canceling the cost of living, after the economy was negatively affected by the Corona virus pandemic, in addition to the drop in oil prices, which is a cornerstone of the economy. The kingdom.

The Kingdom had announced a three-fold increase in value-added tax, starting in July 2020, and stopped a monthly allowance for state employees as of June 2020, as oil prices collapsed.
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