RIYADH: The Gulf’s largest miner, the Arabian Mining Co., known as Ma’aden, has formed the backbone of Saudi Arabia’s mining sector since it was established in 1997. Its role in the Kingdom became more prominent when the Saudi Vision 2030 was launched in 2016, which introduced plans to diversify the economy from its reliance on oil. Mining was identified as a key industry that would aid economic transformation. With a market cap topping SR100 billion ($26.9 billion), the mining firm is among the Kingdom’s 10 biggest players by market value and is one of the fastest-growing mining companies in the world. Despite COVID-19 industrial slowdowns that have hindered many firms, Ma’aden remained influential in shaping the Saudi mining sector through a wide range of projects, investments and acquisitions in the Kingdom and abroad. Amid efforts to fully exploit the Kingdom’s reserves, Ma’aden will begin operations in the largest gold mine in the country in the Makkah region, on the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula. Work will commence in the first quarter of the year. “This project is our largest gold mine,” Ma’aden CEO Abdulaziz Al-Harbi told Arab News in an interview last October. The mine will play a crucial role in achieving the company’s target of producing 1 million ounces of gold per year by 2025. The firm is on course to become one of the top three global phosphate fertilizer producers in the world. It closed the pre-operational stage of the $900 million ammonia plant in Ras Al-Khair industrial city in mid-2021, marking the first project of its “Phosphate 3” portfolio expansion. “The ammonia plant expansion will add over 1 million tons ammonia production to reach 3.3 million tons, making Ma’aden one of the largest ammonia producers east of the Suez Canal,” Al-Harbi noted. Ma’aden has also consistently managed to attract foreign investors, including US firm Alcoa, which has a 25 percent stake in two of Ma’aden’s subsidiaries as part of a $10.8 billion joint venture. In 2019, the company concluded its first international acquisition when it bought an 85 percent stake of a Mauritius-based fertilizer company, Meridian Group, valued at $140 million. These milestones have helped the mining giant pave the way to making the Saudi mining sector more appealing to local and international investors. For the first nine months of 2021, Ma’aden posted a net profit of SR3.14 billion, swinging from a net loss of SR781 million during the same period in 2020, when the pandemic slowed worldwide growth. The recovery was due to higher average sales prices of all products except gold, the company said in a bourse filing. Ma’aden’s key minerals, phosphate and aluminum, contributed to SR9.48 billion and SR7.1 billion of revenues respectively, up from a collective SR10.9 billion in the same period last year. A higher share of net profit from joint ventures also boosted Ma’aden’s profits. Looking at the stock performance, Riyadh-based Ma’aden has a solid history of growing stock value that has increased in the past two years, even amid hefty market swings. In 2021, the stock jumped more than 93 percent to end the year at SR78.5.