The Business Year's latest report on the Saudi economy, Special Report: Digital Kingdom—How COVID-19 Changed the Conversation in Saudi Arabia, examines how COVID-19 accelerated digitalization efforts across the public and private sectors and better helped the kingdom see beyond oil and gas. This 112-page special report contains interviews with top business leaders from across the economy, as well as a range of news and analysis.

Like countries the world over, Saudi Arabia has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. But while other nations simply adapted to the work-from-home model and embraced digital payment solutions more readily, Saudi Arabia undertook a fundamental overhaul of its national technology strategy. This report explores the countless digital innovations being integrated with daily life in Saudi Arabia, based on interviews with key contributors to the country’s technology ecosystem. This 29-page publication documents the historic adoption of technology that is transforming life in Saudi Arabia today. This publication is about adaptation. It is about the change that took place during the pandemic and about what that change has created in the post-pandemic era.

Saudi Arabia has in recent years committed large-scale investments in digitalizing its economy. In this special report, we delve deeper into these developments through the eyes of the business and political leaders who are leading the charge. This special report comes in a new series of online publications, focusing on a certain aspect or industry in one of our 35 global markets. Our reports are consumed by investors, analysts, and decision makers around the world. This 74-page report covers digital governance, financial technology, telecoms and cybersecurity, logistics, industry, and education.

Saudi Arabia had digital tools before COVID-19, but that only during the pandemic were they fully adopted by the public and the government alike. A new era of governance has begun, and Saudi Arabia is rolling out unprecedented tools to enable its transformation. This report covers the adaptation of the Kingdom’s government to new technological approaches, and the role of the National Digital Transformation Unit (NDU).

This 56-page special report, one of a series examining the resilience of GCC economies in the face of COVID-19 and produced in partnership with Parsons, casts an eye across key sectors of the economy during this period, including transformative technologies, resources, logistics, education, and investment, drawing on the words of the businesspeople we have spoken with in recent months. It aims to paint a picture of the resilience of Saudi Arabia at this crucial time, as well as one of the country's potential fortunes in the post-COVID-19 environment.

Throughout this 116-page special report, we tell the story of the birth of a sector through the words of the figures who are busy trying to make it a success, including a number of foreign investors, heads of government authorities, and figures involved in the development of the well-known “gigaprojects” that are placing Saudi Arabia’s ambitions prominently into news feeds around the world. “Just the simple act of allowing public performance was the first drop of this big ripple effect,” said Ahmad M Alammary, a Saudi DJ better known locally as Baloo, the Chief Creative Officer of MDL-BEAST, an entertainment firm with deep roots in the music business. And it was a sentiment we heard throughout our time in the country. And now the starting gun has been fired, any-thing could happen.

This publication was compiled over the course of several months of interviews in Saudi Arabia after the COVID-19 outbreak. The pace of internal reform in the Kingdom has been significant over the past three-five years, and in many cases the old, low-tech, and sclerotic public service that had so long been a feature of Saudi Arabia was vastly changed when the pandemic arrived in Riyadh. Nonetheless, this virus has challenged the modernizing bureaucracy in the desert at a magnitude that no other event, be it war or reform, has even come close to doing.