SAUDI Arabia’s Alarabi Decoration and Construction is considering expanding its workforce on the back of increasing demand for its specialist decorative services in the kingdom.

“The region’s construction industry is buoyant with civil projects worth trillions of dollars expected to come on the market over the next few years,” says Saleh M Saleh, the business consultant of the Jeddah-headquartered firm.
He continues: “We expect to be very busy over the next decade as there are not many others of our caliber and experience who are capable of taking on these volumes of work. The market holds immense potential and we are hopeful of working on prestigious projects for Saudi Oger such as the King Abdullah International Conference Centre in Jeddah and Guest Palace Hotel and Symposium Center in Riyadh.”
Saleh says that Alarabi has widened its scope of activities to include work such as parquet flooring, interior fit-outs and joinery, to enable it to implement interior projects on a turnkey basis.
Alarabi has completed three hotel projects in Makkah. These include the 1,320-suite Le Meridien Hotel & Towers, and the prestigious Dar Al Tawhid Hotel and the Safa Palace Hotel, both of which are constructed by Saudi Oger.
The company is also involved in the renovation and modification of the Gulf Palace Hotel in Dammam, also under a sub-contract from Saudi Oger.
Among recently completed projects, Alarabi executed major work on the interiors of newly-opened Park Hyatt in Jeddah, including gypsum ceiling work and internal and external paintings.
“We’ve also worked on several luxury royal palaces and private luxury villas in the Saudi Arabia, where we carried out fibrous gypsum and painting works,” says Saleh, adding that Alarabi enjoys an enviable position in the market, being the preferred interior decorator for leading Saudi contractors such as Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), Saudi Oger and Almabani General Contracting.
Business levels have been so high that the interior decoration specialist is now looking at urgently hiring 250 more craftsmen to add to its current workforce of 1,000.
“We are fully booked and doing our best to cope with orders. In fact, we have had to keep some new orders on hold so that we fulfill the contracts that we already have in hand,” says Saleh. “The construction industry’s growth has resulted in a shortage of skilled labour. We need more staff and are currently processing visas to recruit artisans right from Morocco to the Philippines.”
Meanwhile, to tackle the problem of increasing material costs, Alarabi has had to limit the validity of its quotations to 30 days instead of the two to three months that it offered previously, he says.
Commenting on trends in the interiors market, Saleh says: “With the bulk of the construction activity in the kingdom, there is greater demand for contemporary designs using gypsum. Classis and neo-classic interiors, however, are still popular in the luxury residential sector such as palaces.”
Founded by Faisal K Adham in Jeddah in 1982, Alarabi Decoration and Construction has grown to become a major interior and exterior decoration specialist in the Middle East.
Over the past 26 years, Alarabi has undertaken a variety of decorative gypsum, special painting and artistic decoration works for numerous projects and clientele across the Middle East. Its expertise covers the entire spectrum of decoration works from gypsum decorative ceilings and walls to artistic painting applications, and from furniture and special woodworks to marble and glass mosaic and tiling works for pool and murals.
Alarabi has its head office and a 2,000-sq-m workshop in Jeddah, and a branch office and 500-sq-m workshop in Riyadh.
Overseas, its Kuwait operations (Alarabi International for Decoration) has seen its business grow consistently since its launch in 2004, while its Abu Dhabi office (Alarabi Decoration), set up in 2006, was recently involved in the multi-million-dollar refurbishment of the Abu Dhabi Intercontinental in the capital city of the UAE.