On October 24, 2017, after speaking with Masayoshi Son, Chairman of SoftBank Group, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman announced his solar energy project, which he described as the largest project in the world; of course, without taking into account the feasibility studies or even the budget to fund his fictional projects, such as in the Neom “city of human dreamers” project.
On March 28, 2018, the Saudi Crown Prince signed an agreement for a solar energy project with the head of SoftBank Group in the US. The project’s cost amounting to $200 billion, providing the beginning of working in the first phase of the project in the middle of 2018.
The project will be built on an area bigger in size than Tokyo, and this mock project will provide 200 gigawatts of solar energy, provide 100,000 jobs for young people, save $ 40 billion of Saudi’s economy -which is the value spent annually due to generating electricity from burning oil- and will pump $ 12 billion annually into the Saudi economy; all according to bin Salman, not according to the strategic facts of feasibility studies.
Evaporating Promises
According to the terms of the agreement concluded by Saudi Arabia with SoftBank, the production of solar energy was planned to start in 2019 with the production of 7.2 gigawatts, but the terms were soon modified to reduce the production to 4 gigawatts.
6 months after the agreement, the entire project stopped for several reasons, the most important of which are:
- The unrealistic scale of the idea of the project
- Complex procedures for an unplanned project, with high demands
- The biography of Masayoshi Son, who has been famous throughout his life as the one with the largest profitable projects, but in reality there is not a single successful project he achieved.
The SoftBank Group has announced its withdrawal from the solar energy project after financial disagreements between it and the Saudi crown prince, thus wasting tens of billions of dollars Saudi’s budget, like other projects like NEOM and others.
The international media revealed the failure of a deal between the Saudi crown prince and Softbank -a Japanese telecommunications company- to invest $ 45 billion for the Saudi crown prince.
In mocking of the Saudi crown prince, Sun said when the broadcaster asked him in an interview on the American Bloomberg Channel “How did you convince the Saudi prince to invest 45 billion in an hour? Son replied: This did not happen because it did not take an hour as you say, but the deal was concluded in just 45 minutes.
Bin Salman’s losses in this deal amounted to $ 16.5 billion, according to SoftBank in April of 2020.
All these failures and others prove two things, the first of which is the failure of the 2030 Vision promoted by the Saudi Crown Prince, and the second: the addiction of the crown prince to failure in making trade deals and wasting huge opportunities at the expense of the KSA’s budget; his country’s economy, and the aspirations of his people.
READ MORE: Is Neom just a complicated scam?
