New service to help start business in Saudi Arabia in three steps

Saudi Arabian Ministry of Investment on Monday launched a new service to establish and start a business from outside the Kingdom, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce, to enable companies and investors to issue investment licenses quickly  per international best practices.

Investors and companies wanting to do business in the Kingdom will benefit from the new reforms. It also comes as a result of integration and partnership between government agencies to address the challenges facing investors and contributes to raising the competitiveness of the Kingdom’s investment environment regionally and globally. 

For new investors, the new service will require only three steps: visiting the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs website and applying for “adding a request for attestation of a contract” at the Kingdom’s embassies abroad. 

The second step requires the investors to visit the electronic services portal on the Ministry of Investment website where they can apply for the license issuance, while the final step requires the investor to visit the Ministry of Commerce website to authenticate the establishment contract of the business and issue the commercial register.

The Ministry of Investment confirmed that the new service, which was inaugurated in a number of the Kingdom’s embassies, will bring about fundamental changes in the investor’s journey, facilitate the establishment and start of foreign companies’ businesses, and overcome the obstacles they faced in the past. This included, for example, the need for companies to visit the Kingdom to document incorporation contracts with the multiplicity of documents that must be submitted and redundancy of requests, and visits to various government agencies for verification, which used to be attributed to the lack of electronic connectivity between the Ministry of Investment and the Ministries of Trade and Foreign Affairs.

The ministry added that there will be a broad marketing campaign in several languages to ensure that the largest possible segment of foreign investors and companies can benefit from the new service.