Lucid Motors plans to introduce an agency sales model in its upcoming Middle East markets as the US EV maker continues training Saudi workers and expanding its manufacturing base in the region.
Faisal Sultan, Lucid‘s vice president and president for the Middle East, said the company is preparing to adopt an agency model in the new Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
“We’re direct-to-consumer in both KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] and UAE [United Arab Emirates],” Sultan said at the Giga Africa 2025 event in Morocco.
“In other GCC countries we’re probably going to be slightly different, more of an agency model perhaps,” he added. “That is going to help us to expand quickly in the smaller markets.”
The GCC bloc includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar.
Lucid’s shift mirrors its plans for the new markets in Europe. The company has recently announced that it is adjusting its business model in Germany with the introduction of dealerships across Europe’s largest car market.
In the Middle East, Sultan has recently said the company aims to enter “one or two” new GCC countries per year.
“Next year, you will see another two GCC countries coming live with Lucid,” he said, without naming the markets.
Lucid is also training Saudi nationals ahead of the full production ramp-up at its factory in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC).
The plant currently assembles semi-knocked-down kits imported from Arizona and will later become a complete build unit (CBU) facility with an annual capacity target of 150,000 vehicles.
“We will need thousands of people, we’ll have to continue to keep on training people,” Sultan said. He added that “three or four batches have gone to Arizona and California, got trained and came back” to Saudi Arabia.
The training program is supported by Saudi Arabia’s Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF), which Sultan said has provided $50 million to train local workers
“Through NAVA, through HRDF — which has already given us $50 million to train Saudi nationals — we’ve actually started,” he said.
Lucid is also working on establishing its local supply chain in the kingdom.
According to Sultan, the company has signed “about two or three contracts” with suppliers that will build facilities adjacent to Lucid’s KAEC plant.
“We will continue to build on them in the next few years to continuously add supplier by supplier,” he said. “That way we are competitive in our pricing to send this product to the world.”
From its Saudi base, Lucid plans to export to other Middle Eastern and GCC countries as well as to Europe and Asia, excluding China.
The company reported $7.5 million in revenue from Saudi Arabia and $314,000 from the UAE in the first quarter of 2025. For the full year of 2024, revenue from the kingdom totaled $191.1 million.
Lucid delivered its first vehicles in the UAE last December, marking its sixth global market.
In Europe, the EV maker will expand next year to France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and several other markets.
The EV maker, which is majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), established its Middle East headquarters in Riyadh late last year.
In another interview, Sultan said Lucid has a “super high” conversion rate compared to other automakers and that the company’s priority for 2025 is to boost brand awareness and draw more consumers to its products.
