RIYADH: In a bid to strengthen the electric vehicle market in Saudi Arabia, Lucid Motors has appointed Turqi Al-Nowaiser as the chairman of its board of directors. Al-Nowaiser currently serves as the deputy governor and head of the international investments division at the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. He was a board member at Lucid Motors and has also served as a member of several companies and committees of the PIF. Al-Nowaiser worked as a senior adviser at the PIF from October 2015 to September 2016, before which he held several executive roles at Saudi Fransi Capital, a financial services firm in the Kingdom. Al-Nowaiser has also been on the board of directors of Hapag-Lloyd AG, an international shipping and container transportation company, since February 2018. He holds a bachelor’s degree in international business from King Saud University and a master’s in business administration from the University of San Francisco. The sovereign fund owns about 67 percent of the stakes in Lucid Motors, which plans to produce 155,000 units of EVs at its new plant in Saudi Arabia to address the growing demand for the vehicles. Earlier in March, while talking to Arab News on the sidelines of the Private Sector Forum in Riyadh, Faisal Sultan, Lucid Motors’ vice president and managing director in the Middle East, said that the firm aims to roll out its first fully Saudi-assembled electric car in September in the coastal city of Jeddah. “Very exciting things are happening at Lucid. If you fly to Jeddah and drive to King Abdullah Economic City, you will find the location of our plant… Pretty soon, we will start putting the equipment there,” said Sultan. The King Abdullah Economic City plant will be Lucid Motor’s first manufacturing unit outside the US. The Saudi Industrial Development Fund financed the project with SR5 billion ($1.3 billion), and the venture is expected to create over 4,500 jobs in KAEC. According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, the Middle East and African EV market was valued at $40.25 million in 2021 and is expected to reach $93.10 million by 2027, registering a compound annual growth rate of more than 15 percent during the forecast period.