Saudi Arabia - Ion Besteliu is a senior urban planner with extensive experience shaping sustainable and resilient urban planning, design and implementation across Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. A passionate advocate for deep sustainability and resilience in urban planning and design, he has worked with public agencies, development banks, and private partners to align urban practice with tangible sustainability gains in both design and delivery. From pioneering city or regional blue green frameworks, to developing city-resilience strategies, to advancing sustainable and bioclimatic design, Ion’s work bridges the gap between policy, spatial planning, and innovation implementation. His mission: to help the Region’s expanding cities grow ever closer to deep sustainability via gainful application of emerging innovation systems.
In this exclusive conversation, he shares his insights on the promise of advanced modular prefabrication to deliver the next generation of construction across the region.
Summary
From Expo 2030 to the FIFA World Cup 2034, Saudi Arabia is racing against time—and modular construction may help in winning the sprint.
Globally, modular construction is reshaping the industry, projected to reach $203.8B by 2030. Advanced manufacturing, robotics, and digital integration are driving speed, cost efficiency, and sustainability.
In the Middle East, KSA and UAE are leading the charge. Vision 2030 giga-projects like the Red Sea and Diriyah Gate demand rapid, scalable solutions. Modular methods deliver 50% faster timelines and 45% lower carbon footprints, making them important for:
- Public housing (70% homeownership target by 2030)
- Expo 2030 Riyadh (6M m² site, $7.8B investment)
- FIFA World Cup 2034 (15 stadiums, 132 training facilities)
Case studies from Singapore, UAE, KSA, Japan, China, UK, and USA prove modular’s success in housing, healthcare, and education.
Call to Action: Egis needs to prepare for working with modular prefabrication and building industrialization now, both in the upstream planning and design and in downstream implementation and operation.
Is there a global trend towards construction industrialization?
Yes. Worldwide, industrialized modular prefabrication is redefining how we build. The modular construction market is projected to grow from $159.3 billion in 2024 to $203.8 billion by 2030, driven by urbanization and housing shortages, labor shortages, and sustainability mandates.
Advanced manufacturing, robotics, and digital integration (BIM, AI, IoT) are accelerating adoption, while eco-friendly materials support green building goals.
What is industrialized modular prefabrication?
Industrialized Modular Prefabrication is a construction methodology where building components or entire modules are manufactured in a controlled factory environment using industrialized processes - increasingly including robotic manufacturing - then transported to the site for assembly.
This covers both the transportation of large fully pre-assembled units such as bathrooms and entire apartments or hotel rooms, but it also applies to precision manufacturing in a ‘flat pack’ approach, with smaller modules assembled on site, allowing greater flexibility but also involving greater complexity.
What are the advantages?
- Industrialized modularity delivers multiple advantages compared to traditional methods:
- Construction times are reduced by up to 50% in current cases, with the potential for even greater efficiency as maturity increases,
- Buildings can achieve up to 45% lower carbon footprints compared to traditional methods
- Costs can be cut by up to 20%, especially for large projects with repeatable typologies such as housing
- Robotized processes and simplified dry assembly mean construction precision moves from centimeters to millimeters: the quality jump is massive
- Cradle-to-cradle circularity and materials re-use are facilitated
- The potential impact on ecologically fragile sites is reduced, since apart from foundation works and utilities connections, most components are produced remotely and can be dry-assembled, disassembled, and recycled with minimal site impact,
- Industrialized modular solutions facilitate using a unified BIM/digital twin platform across the building life cycle to handle design, manufacturing, construction assembly, handover, subsequent operations and facility management, rehabilitation and upgrading and final disassembly and recycling.
Why would the KSA leverage construction industrialization?
In the GCC, Saudi Arabia is possibly the prime target for industrialized modular construction.
KSA Vision 2030 and giga-projects such as the Red Sea, Qiddiya, Diriyah Gate and others demand rapid, scalable, and sustainable solutions. The KSA modular market alone is expected to grow from $4.2 billion in 2023 to $6.5 billion by 2028.
Public housing programs under KSA Vision 2030 aim to raise homeownership to 70% by 2030, and modular construction could be instrumental to achieving this target. Al‑Rajhi Capital projects cumulative demand at roughly 1.2 million homes by 2030, while planned supply is around 800,000 units, implying a shortfall of ~400,000 homes. [zawya.com]
Knight Frank estimates that to reach the 70% ownership target, 115,000+ homes need to be completed annually—factoring in population growth and new household formation
For mega-events, the stakes are even higher. Riyadh Expo 2030 involves a $7.8 billion investment and a 6 million m² site requiring sustainable pavilions and infrastructure, some unique but many repeatable and adapted to modularity.
FIFA World Cup 2034 will demand 15 stadiums, 132 training facilities, and 73 accommodation centers—projects that modular construction can deliver efficiently while meeting sustainability goals.
Moreover, modular construction is a potentially very significant aid in efficiently delivering public amenities nationwide, especially health and education facilities. International experience during COVID has shown that modular prefabrication for hospitals has lead to very short construction delivery times, and lessons learned can be capitalized upon.
Finally, modular industrialized construction is particularly adapted to industrial and logistics buildings. As part of the priority for non-petroleum development inscribed in Vision 2030 and the National Industrial Policy, the KSA is developing multipole industrial zones nationwide, with thousands of new factories and logistics sheds required. MODON already has developed standard factory designs, particularly adaptable to modular construction industrialization as ‘kits of parts.
Why then is modular industrialized construction not more widespread?
Despite numerous advantages, industrialized modularity faces two types of hurdles, a past negative image, and objective difficulties for the design and production ‘pioneers’.
Image Hurdles
Image hurdles are mainly related to the end quality:
- An owner-financer perception still endures - industrialized modular construction cannot deliver quality. This may have been true of technologies several decades old. Today, modular prefabrication is being successfully used in high-end luxury hospitality projects such as the Red Sea project in the KSA,
- A second negative image amongst owners, managers as well as designers: only identical ‘cookie cutter’ units of housing, hospitality etc. can be produced. This is no longer the case: adaptable modular steel skeletons and a vast array of interior and exterior modular composite panels now allow a great variety of solutions and assemblies to be developed, even for smaller orders.
- Architects may still hesitate in applying modular off-site fabrication lest industrial process demands dampen creativity. In fact, the opposite may be true, insofar as new materials and processes allow new forms of expression.
Production Hurdles
Production hurdles mainly derive from a lack of familiarity with risk control.
The construction industry is inherently conservative: legal liability, tight deadlines and budgets, tried and true’ methods all favor applying efficiency gains incrementally rather than jumping into the sea-change of advanced robotic prefabrication.
The potential of 20% cost economies is accompanied by an estimated risk of 10% cost overruns, especially at first iteration, if the process is not well managed.
Design lead times at first iteration would tend to be longer by several months to accommodate manufacturing detail. Thus a 5-month design process for housing would become a 7-month process. This extra time is, however, recuperated with repeated units or unit sub-modules.
Finally, the setting up of factories is relatively costly (order of 50 to 100m USD) and potentially high risk for the first generation of investors. Currently low costs for traditional construction components and relatively low labor costs may additionally disincentivize initial investment in production capacity.
Can these hurdles be overcome?
Yes. Most of these hurdles can be or are being removed in the KSA and the GCC:
On the supply side:
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The construction Industry is a target sector as part of Vision 2030 and National Industrial Policy.
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Favorable domestic financing and legislation are being implemented by the KSA to attract FDI and foster Joint ventures and PPPs in the industrial sector.
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Both the KSA and UAE are incentivizing industrial location at multiple sites. This applies to prefabricated modular components producers as well. As a result, fabricators of modular solutions are already present or positioning themselves in the KSA.
Additionally, and structurally: advances in robotics and advanced manufacturing allow smaller factories to be viable, reducing initial costs and easing upscaling. Complementary international green financing may also be available, should ESG criteria be met.
On the demand side: We have already looked at the opportunities afforded by both mega projects and a mass of housing and amenities needed. This is compounded by construction labor costs being set to increase and by growing shortages in labor, whereas industrialized modularity very significantly cuts the number of workers as well as opening the door for a highly skilled sunset of the construction workforce to be developed domestically.
The impetus is to create regional manufacturing hubs which will reduce import dependency and logistics costs, foster public-private partnerships for technology transfer and workforce upskilling and position the KSA and at the tip of the spear in construction innovation.
What might this mean for engineering and consultancy firms? For Egis?
The trend has been noted by the consultancy and engineering nexus, and firms such as Knight Frank and McKenzie have, by 2023, already developed studies and position papers
On the design-engineering, implementation, and operation side of the equation, Egis, through its involvement in several of KSA’s giga-projects and by its expertise throughout the entire project cycle, is well placed to contribute to integrating construction industrialization and modular prefabrication into major project, helping our KSA Clients reach goals on time and at quality.
This, however, requires engaging with modular prefabrication and building industrialization now, both in the planning and implementation of large-scale projects:
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By integrating modular-industrialized variations upstream, in market feasibility, programming, initial spatial planning and projects costing, staging and implementation planning
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By developing an early understanding of fabricators / supplier’s potential as well as limitations. This would, for instance, involve engaging with fabricators to integrate modular construction industrialization into BIM and Digital Twin processes at scale; Dashboarding time, cost and sustainability gains for large projects; Integrating operations and facility management into unified platforms managing a cradle-to-cradle construction cycle etc.
Overall, elements of preparing and securing an early competitive advantage.
Can this knowledge be applied elsewhere?
Yes. Experience gained regionally is internationally relevant, structurally as well as operationally.
Structurally, studies on the future of the construction sector (Mc Kinsey, 2023) place construction industrialization as an inevitable horizon for the next 10 to 15 years, with very significant shifts in the profit distribution between the construction industry, designers, contractors and operators.
Operationally, early integration of construction industrialization is applicable beyond the KSA’s Mega projects, worldwide to hospitality, sports, amenities and housing projects, wherever the pressure to build sustainably, at scale and at speed warrants the innovation risk.
