ICV and iktva: local content rules for Saudi and UAE bids

"Local content" sounds like policy language until it decides a tender. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for anyone selling to government or to the major national companies, it is a certified, documented attribute of your business, weighed in bid evaluations where the buyer's program calls for it. Suppliers who treat it as paperwork keep losing to suppliers who treat it as a commercial position.

This guide covers what the main programs are, who they apply to, and what a supplier should do about them before the next tender, not during it. It also covers the buyer side, because localization preferences increasingly shape evaluation criteria, and there is a fair way and an unfair way to apply them.

Local content is an attribute of your company, not of your bid

Start with where local content actually lives. It is not something you write into a proposal. It is a property of your company that gets measured: where you manufacture, what you spend inside the country, who you employ. Each program below defines its own way of measuring that, and most of them produce a certificate with your company's name on it.

That has a hard practical consequence. You cannot improve your local-content position during a tender. By the time a request is published, your certificate says what it says. The work happens in the months before: choosing where to source, documenting domestic spend, getting certified, and keeping the certificate current. A supplier who starts thinking about local content when the tender lands has already conceded that part of the evaluation.

The four regimes

Four programs cover most of what a supplier will meet across the two markets.

Two cautions about reading this table. First, these are separate programs with separate documentation, so do not assume that paperwork prepared for one satisfies another without checking with the body that runs it. Second, the table describes who runs each regime, not the requirements of any specific tender. The tender document always governs, and reading its local-content clauses in full is part of deciding whether to bid at all.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Vision 2030, the Kingdom's official economic and social transformation program launched in 2016, is the policy backdrop for the localization programs below. The most direct of them is the Local Content and Government Procurement Authority, the LCGPA, established by Royal Decree in 2018. The LCGPA develops local content policy and oversees local-content requirements in Saudi government procurement, which means that if you sell to a Saudi government entity, its rules reach your bid.

The bidding itself happens on Etimad, the unified government tenders and procurement platform launched by the Ministry of Finance in 2018. Etimad is how the private sector bids on Saudi government tenders. Registration there is a precondition of government work, not an optional extra.

Aramco runs its own framework. iktva, short for In-Kingdom Total Value Add, is Saudi Aramco's localization program, launched in 2015 and aimed at increasing local content and building in-Kingdom supplier capability. If Aramco sits anywhere in your customer chain, iktva is the lens your local-content story will be read through, so document it in that shape.

One adjacent program deserves two sentences. Nitaqat is Saudi Arabia's workforce-nationalization program, run by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, and it classifies private companies into compliance bands by their share of Saudi-national employees. It is a labour-market program rather than a procurement one, but workforce composition is part of how localization gets read, so know your band before a buyer asks about it.

The UAE

The UAE's path ran through its national oil company. ADNOC launched its In-Country Value program in 2018, certifying suppliers on domestic manufacturing and spend, third-party UAE spend, and Emiratization records. The model was then adopted federally: the National ICV Program, run by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, was rolled out nationally in 2021 building on ADNOC's approach.

Under the national program, a supplier obtains an ICV certificate, issued annually by empanelled certifying bodies. That certificate improves the supplier's scoring position in government and major national-company tenders. In plain terms: two comparable bids, and the one backed by an ICV certificate scores better than the one without, wherever the program applies.

What this means for private-sector tenders

Be precise here, because much of the advice in circulation is not. The certification regimes above are government and national-company procurement mechanisms. No rule forces a private company to score local content in its purchasing. A private buyer may choose to weigh localization, and many now do, but that is the buyer's choice, expressed in its own evaluation criteria.

For a supplier, the conclusion is not to ignore local content in private tenders. It is the opposite. A certificate you already hold is free evidence: present it whether or not the buyer asked, because a buyer choosing between two similar bids will read a current ICV certificate or documented Saudi local content as a signal of operational substance, even with no program requiring them to.

The supplier checklist

Four moves, in order.

1. Map your buyers to regimes. List your target accounts and pipeline, then mark which regime each one sits under: Saudi government via Etimad and the LCGPA's requirements, Aramco via iktva, ADNOC via its ICV program, UAE government and major national companies via the National ICV Program, and private buyers who set their own rules. This map decides which certificates are worth the cost of obtaining.

2. Certify before the tender, not during it. Certification takes real preparation: financial records, spend documentation, workforce records. None of that compresses into a bid window. Start the process when the pipeline points at a regime, not when a specific tender does, and weigh the cost of certifying against the full pipeline it opens rather than against any single tender.

3. Treat it as an annual cycle. ICV certificates under the UAE's national program are issued annually. A certificate that expires mid-pursuit is worse than none, because it signals a lapsed process. Put the renewal on the calendar the day the certificate arrives.

4. Put it where buyers look. A certificate in a drawer wins nothing. Your company profile should state which certifications you hold and keep them current, because buyers shortlist from profiles before they ever open a bid. We covered how to build that presence in the supplier profile that wins work.

The buyer side: weigh it openly or not at all

If localization matters to your organization, put it in the evaluation criteria with an explicit weight, stated in the tender before bids arrive. The alternative, deciding after the bids are in that the local supplier "feels safer" and bending the scores toward it, is unfair to bidders who priced without that information and indefensible when a losing supplier asks how the decision was made.

Explicit weighting also produces better bids. A supplier who knows local content carries real weight will surface certificates, domestic spend, and workforce records that a silent preference would never draw out. The same logic applies earlier in the funnel: if localization is a requirement, screen for it at prequalification rather than discovering it at scoring, a discipline we walk through in how to prequalify suppliers.

Where this meets VEXORS

VEXORS is built around the idea that evaluation should be explicit. When a buyer publishes a request, the evaluation criteria and their weights are structured fields, so a localization preference is stated up front instead of applied silently after bids arrive. On the Scale plan, questionnaires let the buyer ask every bidder the same certification questions in the same shape, which makes ICV certificates and local-content documentation comparable across bids. The AI scores what comes back against the criteria the buyer set, and the buyer always makes the decision.

For suppliers, the profile is the asset. A supplier profile that documents certifications, registrations, and delivery history is what gets you found and trusted before any tender opens. Open requests are visible live at /tenders, and creating an account takes a few minutes at /register. If any of the terminology in this piece is new, the glossary defines the vocabulary buyers use in these evaluations.

The regimes will keep evolving, and the specific requirements attached to any tender are always worth reading in full. What will not change is the direction: in both markets, local content has become part of how a bid is scored. The suppliers who win under that arrangement are the ones who measured, certified, and published their position before the tender asked for it.