RIYADH: The Federation of Saudi Chambers is studying ways to bring private-sector companies’ outsourced jobs currently handled abroad back to service providers in the Kingdom, according to Sultan Al-Musallam, the federation’s secretary-general, during an interview with Asharq Business with Bloomberg on the sidelines of AIM Congress in Dubai. The outsourcing sector encompasses activities including information technology, call centers, and shared services, as well as accounting, human resources, data analysis, operations and maintenance, and consultancy. Localizing these activities could create jobs at different levels, transfer knowledge and technology, and strengthen operational sovereignty. Saudi Arabia spent about SR8 billion ($2.13 billion) on imports of professional and management consulting services during the first quarter of this year, according to international trade-in-services data issued by the General Authority for Statistics. The study, being conducted by the Kingdom, examines why companies turn to foreign rather than local service providers, including service quality, lower costs, the availability of specialized expertise and speed of implementation. It also considers companies’ willingness to move these services to local providers within 12 to 24 months, according to a report published by Asharq Al-Awsat. At the same time, “the Kingdom is moving toward achieving the target of a 65 percent private sector contribution to gross domestic product by 2030,” Al-Musallam said. He noted that the private sector’s contribution had reached approximately 52 percent. Saudi push to strengthen local content Among the most significant potential obstacles to localizing outsourcing services are gaps in domestic expertise, relatively higher costs, and the risk of service disruption during the transition, as well as the complexity of migrating data and the absence of a reliable local provider of comparable scale, according to the study. The analysis also comes alongside a government drive to strengthen local content. In April, the Local Content and Government Procurement Authority announced the application of a local-content weighting mechanism in the financial evaluation of administrative consultancy and information technology service tenders. The authority said at the time that it would require a minimum local-content level of 30 percent in administrative consultancy tenders with an estimated cost of SR10 million or more from April 2027. The requirement will be extended to tenders valued at SR5 million or more from January 2028.