Saudi Arabia's materials sector has spent the better part of two years navigating a difficult divergence. On one side sits SABIC, the kingdom's petrochemical flagship, grinding through a structural margin compression that has tested even the most patient investors on Tadawul. On the other sits Ma'aden, the national mining company, whose financial trajectory has moved in precisely the opposite direction. Understanding why these two companies are telling such different stories in 2025 requires following the physical material, not the share price.

Start with SABIC.

The company reported a net profit of SAR 1.5 billion for the full year 2024, compared to a net loss of SAR 2.8 billion in 2023

, a headline that looks like a recovery until you examine the underlying mechanics.

Annual revenue fell 1 percent to SAR 140 billion and sales volumes dropped 2 percent to 45.1 million metric tonnes from 45.9 million in 2023.

The return to profitability was not driven by a genuine improvement in petrochemical demand.

The company recorded a SAR 3.52 billion reduction in total losses from discontinued operations, driven by the fair value assessment of Saudi Iron and Steel Co.

Strip that accounting effect away and the operating picture remains constrained.

The global petrochemical market faced significant challenges in 2024, driven by persistent oversupply from ongoing capacity expansions and weaker-than-expected global demand growth, which kept prices subdued.

Ethylene and propylene derivative capacity growth, dominated by China and the United States since 2020, continued at a strong pace during the year.

The feedstock advantage that Saudi producers have historically relied upon, cheap ethane from Aramco, has not been sufficient to offset the volume of Chinese capacity that has come online and depressed global olefin spreads.

SABIC recorded an unexpected loss of SAR 1.89 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024, weighed down by rising fixed costs,

a reminder that the recovery in the first three quarters of the year was fragile rather than structural.

SABIC's CEO warned that challenges in the petrochemicals sector were likely to persist throughout 2025.

The petrochemical sector on Tadawul more broadly reflected this pressure.

Only three of Saudi Arabia's ten listed petrochemical companies reported improved earnings in the first nine months of 2024 versus the same period of 2023.

That is not a company-specific story. It is a supply chain story, and the bottleneck is in China's downstream capacity additions, not in Jubail's cracker utilization rates.

Ma'aden's trajectory is a study in contrast, and the reasons are rooted in the physical commodities it produces rather than in any financial engineering.

Record production and strong financials marked 2024, with revenue up 11 percent and net profit up 82 percent year over year.

The momentum carried into 2025.

In the first quarter of 2025, revenue reached SAR 8.51 billion, up 16 percent from Q1 2024, with net income up 58 percent and profit margin expanding to 18 percent from 13 percent a year earlier.

By the third quarter of 2025, the acceleration had become more pronounced.

EPS reached SAR 0.57, up from SAR 0.26 in Q3 2024, on revenue of SAR 10.0 billion, up 24 percent, with net income of SAR 2.21 billion, up 127 percent.

For the full year 2025,

💡 Insight

The physical explanation for this performance sits in three commodities: phosphate, aluminum, and gold.

revenue reached SAR 38.58 billion, an increase of 18.53 percent compared to the previous year, with earnings up 155.89 percent.

The physical explanation for this performance sits in three commodities: phosphate, aluminum, and gold. Ma'aden's phosphate operations, which produce diammonium phosphate for export to Asian agricultural markets, benefited from tighter global supply conditions. Its aluminum business, running through the Ras Al Khair complex, operates on some of the lowest energy costs in the world. And its gold operations have been lifted by a gold price environment that has remained elevated through geopolitical uncertainty.

The company maintained 2025 production guidance across key business units, including phosphate DAP output of 5,900 to 6,200 thousand metric tonnes, primary aluminum of 850 to 1,150 thousand metric tonnes, and gold output of 475 to 560 thousand ounces.

But the more consequential development for anyone thinking seriously about Saudi Vision 2030 mining investment is what Ma'aden is building toward rather than what it has already produced. The company's strategic pivot into critical minerals represents the most significant structural expansion of its mandate since it was founded.

Ma'aden signed an agreement with MP Materials, the American fully integrated rare earth producer, to explore opportunities to establish a fully integrated end-to-end rare earth supply chain, with a memorandum of understanding signed on the sidelines of the US-Saudi Investment Forum 2025 in Riyadh.

That initial framework escalated rapidly.

By November 2025, Ma'aden had signed a binding term sheet with MP Materials, backed by the United States Department of War, to build and operate a rare earth refining and separation facility in the Kingdom.

Under the agreement, MP Materials and the DoW will hold an equity position targeted at 49 percent in the joint venture, with Ma'aden holding a position of no less than 51 percent.

The structure of this deal deserves careful attention.

The collaboration aims to jointly develop a vertically integrated rare earth supply chain in Saudi Arabia, including mining, separation, refining, and magnet production.

The facility is being designed as a central hub for processing, refining, and separation of rare earth elements.

This is not a royalty agreement or an offtake arrangement. It is an attempt to build the full processing stack inside the kingdom, which is precisely what Saudi Vision 2030 mining investment has been designed to achieve: not simply extracting raw material and exporting it, but capturing the value-added steps that have historically migrated to China.

The geopolitical logic is transparent.

The joint venture is intended to deepen economic and security ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia and support industrial resilience without reliance on adversarial sources.

China currently dominates rare earth separation and magnet production with a degree of concentration that makes the kingdom's phosphate export position look diversified by comparison. Saudi Arabia's combination of untapped mineral geology, cheap energy, and strategic location between Asian and European end markets gives it a credible claim to becoming a meaningful node in a rebalanced rare earth supply chain. Whether the geology delivers at commercial scale remains the critical unknown.

The divergence between SABIC and Ma'aden on Tadawul in 2025 is not a story about management quality or capital allocation in isolation. It is a story about where the structural tailwinds are blowing in the global materials economy. Petrochemicals face a prolonged period of Chinese overcapacity that no feedstock advantage fully neutralizes. Mining, and specifically critical minerals, sits at the intersection of energy transition demand and geopolitical supply anxiety, which is precisely where capital is being directed. The Saudi state understands this. The question for investors in the petrochemical sector on Tadawul is how long the margin compression cycle persists before Chinese capacity growth decelerates enough to restore spreads. The question for Ma'aden is whether the rare earth refinery moves from