SAMI Advanced Electronics Company

SAMI Advanced Electronics Company, still widely called AEC, was created in Riyadh in 1988 under the Saudi economic offset programme, which required foreign primes selling into the kingdom to build local industrial capacity in return for their contracts. It began with defence and aviation electronics, added an information and communications technology unit in 1995, an energy business in 2005 and a cyber and national security line in 2015. In December 2020 Saudi Arabian Military Industries bought the company outright in what was described as the largest military industrial transaction ever concluded in the kingdom, placing AEC under the Public Investment Fund through SAMI and giving it a defined part in the localisation targets of Vision 2030. Defence and aerospace remains the anchor. The company builds and repairs avionics line replaceable units, head-up displays and pilot display units, works on sighting systems for Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, supports the AN/ALQ-135 electronic countermeasures set on the F-15 and electronic units on the F-16, and supplies training and familiarisation devices for the Hawk. It also develops command and control systems, tactical communications, passive radar, electronic and communications intelligence solutions, deployable secure networks, electronic shelters and an early warning and observation system, and it has run a software factory in Riyadh with Lockheed Martin covering prototyping through to deployment. Digital business covers enterprise application services, systems integration, managed services and manpower outsourcing, electronic health work including medical device integration and picture archiving, and fleet tracking through the MADAR platform. Energy is the largest commercial line by volume. AEC makes the ADDAD family of smart electricity meters and ultrasonic water meters along with data concentrators, substation meters, advanced metering infrastructure and the Shams range of solar photovoltaic inverters, and it sells metering to utilities as a managed service rather than only as hardware. Security ties the physical and the digital together, running security operations centres as a service, supplying data diodes, sandboxing, cyber ranges and security information and event management systems, and providing protection for infrastructure the kingdom treats as critical. Employment is above 3,200. Two subsidiaries carry parts of the load, Arab Advanced Systems for Simulation on the training side and Advanced Electronics Support Services Company on sustainment. The company says it runs more than 200 programmes at once under one delivery framework, and it reached gold membership of the Made in Saudi scheme on the strength of its localisation rates in electronics manufacturing. It has also been named a supplier of the year by Boeing and by Raytheon, which reflects how much of its early work arrived through offset obligations attached to American programmes.