Saudi Arabia buys into e-commerce
A crown prince bent on modernization, young and tech-savvy consumers, and a global pandemic are transforming commerce in the desert kingdom.
In October 2019, when Saudi Arabia introduced a hallmark e-commerce law, few would have imagined that five months later a global pandemic would all but shutter in-person shopping and the desert kingdom would ban most cash payments.
“There was a rush of businesses trying to go online,” Mazen Al Darrab, co-founder of the Riyadh-based e-commerce enablement company Zid, told Al-Monitor. “The COVID-19 measures doubled our percentage of users.”
For a government bent on digitizing its economy, the timing was fortuitous. Under contentious 35-year-old Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and his Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia aims to transform its oil-dependent kingdom by fostering tech innovation and creating new jobs for its massive young population.
Promoting online business and cashless transactions is one part of this modernizing push. The Gulf country already has higher internet penetration rates than the United States, the European Union and China, and its rollout of 5G technology has been ranked amongst the best in the world.
