Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), the largest utility company in the Middle East and North Africa region, signed on Aug. 26 a syndicated financing agreement worth SR9 billion ($2.4 billion) with seven major local banks.

The financing is a 7-year medium-term facility and is unsecured syndicated borrowing. It was arranged and funded by the National Commercial Bank, Bank Albilad, Al-Rajhi Bank, Riyad Bank, Samba Financial Group, Banque Saudi Fransi and the Saudi British Bank.

Fahad Al-Sudairi, president and chief executive of SEC, said: “SEC is a national utility, delivering electric services to a growing customer base of almost 9.8 million subscribers in Saudi Arabia. Our vigorous focus is to continue demonstrating operational efficiency improvement, achieve a quantum leap in promoting automation and digitization across our business and further enhance the customer service.”

Al-Sudairi added: “This successful financing comes as part of SEC’s plans to finance its general corporate purposes as well as finance its capital projects such as smart meters, grid reliability improvement and new interconnection projects. The financing will also lengthen the average maturity of our financing mix and is expected to reflect positively on reducing our weighted average cost of funding.”

“I am so delighted with the successful closing of this syndication and the significant interest in SEC’s business from all the major local banks; this really demonstrates a vote of confidence from local banks in SEC and its operations. SEC owns a large and extended asset base throughout the Kingdom and plays a vital and tremendous role in supporting the Kingdom’s economic development across all its sectors,” he added.