How Saudi EXIM is forward-positioning to shield industry from Gulf shipping shocks

Saudi EXIM is using its expanding balance sheet to keep Saudi industry supplied. Since early 2025, the export bank has signed reins. agreements with export-credit agencies and insurers in the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy. Most of them cover capital goods and production inputs that Saudi companies import. It has also agreed to a USD 800 mn credit-ins. line with Trafigura that finances mining companies worldwide. The build-out predates the Iran conflict, but it carries more weight now that the cost of moving goods through the Gulf and Red Sea has risen.

“What EXIM is doing with critical-minerals insurance and foreign capital-goods access, securing supply chains for inputs before disruption hits, is forward-positioning,” Ahmad Chreim, economist at MT Trading, tells EnterpriseAM. “It’s Saudi Arabia using a strong balance sheet and a favorable credit rating proactively, to reduce future shock exposure rather than just manage it when it arrives.”

The balance sheet is growing. Saudi EXIM provided SAR 27.67 bn in credit facilities in 1H 2026, up 17.2% y-o-y, with insurance driving the increase. Exports covered by credit ins. rose 32% to SAR 19.47 bn, while export-financing disbursements slipped to SAR 8.20 bn from SAR 8.87 bn. Cumulative facilities reached about SAR 116 bn (USD 30.9 bn) by end-2025, according to the Vision 2030 annual report. Fitch gave the bank its first-ever rating in May 2025, an A+ equalized with the sovereign’s. The agency described the bank as an extension of the government’s diversification agenda.

The growth comes as Saudi industry leans harder on foreign markets and suppliers. Non-oil exports hit a record SAR 622.9 bn in 2025, though the Kingdom’s latest non-oil trade data showed a pullback. Saudi policy now has to address “how its industries secure inputs and supply chains, and how economic relationships reinforce broader bilateral relationships,” John Sfakianakis, chief economist and head of economic research at the Gulf Research Center, tells EnterpriseAM.Saudi EXIM files most of its reins. deals under its Bridges Initiative. The initiative aims to keep raw materials and capital goods flowing to Saudi companies. It opened in February 2025 with agreements with Allianz Trade, France’s Bpifrance, and AIG.

State agencies followed. Saudi EXIM signed a reins. agreement with US EXIM in April, building on a 2024 MoU. It covers US-sourced capital goods and production inputs for Saudi institutions. In February, the bank signed a reins. MoU with UK Export Finance covering capital goods and raw materials Saudi exporters source from the UK, extending a 2022 cooperation MoU. A January agreement with Euler Hermes, which runs Germany’s federal export-credit guarantees, covers German exports to Saudi Arabia and Saudi participation in international projects. The November 2025 deal with Italy’s SACE covers joint Italian-Saudi projects in third countries.

In each case, Saudi EXIM takes on part of a foreign agency’s risk. That makes it easier for Saudi buyers to finance foreign equipment and for foreign suppliers to take on Saudi business.

Minerals put EXIM inside the trade

The Trafigura policy, signed in January, takes the bank further up the supply chain. It provides up to USD 800 mn of credit ins. for multi-year prepayment deals with mining companies globally, starting with a copper transaction. The relationship began with a USD 500 mn credit facility in 2023, raised to USD 700 mn in 2025.

Riyadh values its mineral resources at about SAR 9.4 tn (USD 2.5 tn) and wants processing and downstream industry built around them. “Saudi Arabia is increasingly positioning itself within the investment, financing, processing and trading architecture surrounding those commodities,” Sfakianakis says. “The most effective forms of economic statecraft are often precisely those transactions that are commercially defensible while simultaneously advancing longer-term national objectives.”

The bank’s Africa deals track Riyadh’s diplomacy. Saudi EXIM and the Kenya Development Corporation extended their cooperation agreement until December 2029 as part of a package from the first Saudi-Kenyan political consultations that also covered investment, customs and labor.

Sfakianakis reads the package as a sequence. The political relationship sets the frame, the investment and customs agreements lower barriers, and EXIM finances the trade that follows. Three weeks later, Saudi EXIM signed a reins. agreement with African Trade and Investment Development Insurance in Nairobi, covering Saudi exporters selling into African markets. It already had a 2024 MoU with the Africa Finance Corporation.

The bank’s lending is concentrated in industry and mining and closely tracks the National Industrial Strategy, Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, tells EnterpriseAM. That strategy targets a doubling of industrial exports by 2030. Geopolitics can still shape who the bank works with. “It is common practice, moreover, for Gulf leaders to steer the decisions of their national policy banks, state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth funds and aid agencies toward specific foreign partners,” he tells us.

Riyadh sees East Africa and the Horn as part of its strategic neighborhood, Alhasan says. “In Kenya, the commercial and strategic rationales point in the same direction, suggesting that a dual logic is at play.”

Other tools keep cargo moving

Riyadh is using other institutions to protect trade flows. PIF signed an agreement worth up to USD 15 bn with US EXIM in July to finance its portfolio companies’ purchases of American goods and services. This month, the Cabinet approved a national war-risk ins. pool for cargo and vessels. Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan described it as a public-private mechanism to keep trade and supply chains running.

“They do not need to be directing one another transaction by transaction for the overall effect to be coordinated,” Sfakianakis says. “I would describe the broader phenomenon as strategic alignment rather than bureaucratic direction.”