Middle East Business
Riyadh consultancy signs technology agreement covering water, energy and data centre work
By Staff Writer | 18 August 2026
East Consulting Engineering Company has signed a memorandum of understanding with Siemens Smart Infrastructure covering energy, industry, water, data centres and mechanical, electrical and plumbing projects in Saudi Arabia.
The agreement was reported on 17 August. It was signed by Hisam Siddiqui, Chief Commercial Officer of the consultancy, and Markus Grabmeier, Chief Executive Officer of the Electrical Products Business Unit at Siemens Smart Infrastructure. It is a memorandum of understanding rather than a contract, and it should be read as one: it sets out an intention to work together, and it commits neither party to a project.
What it does is put a technology supplier's products and digital tools alongside a consultancy's engineering and delivery work on schemes in the same five sectors. The consultancy says the arrangement lets it offer additional technology capability to clients working in energy, industrial and digital infrastructure.
The Siemens agreement does not stand alone. It lands within a broader repositioning ECEC has been building. It is measured less by revenue growth than by how much of the Kingdom's highest-barrier infrastructure the firm can serve directly.
Hisam Siddiqui, Chief Commercial Officer of East Consulting Engineering Company
Where the consultancy already sits
Its Power and Infrastructure Delivery department has live engagements in Saudi Arabia, including with the Projects Development Company of Saudi Energy and with the National Grid. It holds prequalifications with the National Water Company, with SPARK, with the Principal Buyer and with Saudi Energy Solutions Valley, and a qualification with Saudi Aramco is under way.
Prequalification is the gate that decides who is allowed to price the work, and it is normally settled long before a tender is issued. A list of prequalifications is therefore a better indicator of a firm's near term workload than a list of the projects it has finished.
One mandate for governance and supervision
The consultancy has also developed what it calls a project management consultancy and construction supervision model, bringing project governance and site supervision under a single mandate. Its Business Excellence Office, set up to run internal delivery standards, is now offered to clients as a governance service in its own right.
That combination is worth pausing on, because it changes where a contractor's certification risk sits. Where project governance and site supervision are held by two separate consultants, a contractor has two sets of eyes and, more usefully, two sets of records. Where both are held under one mandate, the party that writes the delivery standard is also the party that decides on site whether the standard has been met. That is not improper and it is common, but it is a difference a contractor should price and should reflect in how it keeps its own records.
The consultancy puts public and private investment committed in the Kingdom through 2030 at more than SAR 12 trillion, equivalent to about 3.2 trillion dollars. That figure comes from the company rather than from an official source and should be treated accordingly. Its direction, though, is consistent with what contractors and consultants operating in the country already report: demand is running ahead of the supply of firms qualified to serve it, and qualification, rather than capacity, is the constraint.
What to watch
A memorandum of understanding is worth what the first call off is worth. The thing to watch is whether the arrangement produces a named scheme with a scope and a value attached to it, and whether the Aramco qualification completes. Until then this is a positioning move, and the consultancy has described it as one.