Saudi Arabia Council of Ministers Resolution No. 269 — amendments to Precious Metals and Gemstones Law transferring manufacturing supervision to Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources

Mechanism

Saudi Arabia's Precious Metals and Gemstones Law historically vested production and retail licensing alike in the Ministry of Commerce. Resolution No. 269 bifurcates the regulatory stack along the manufacturing/commerce divide:

• Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources (MIM) takes full regulatory, supervisory,

and licensing authority over all manufacturing and industrial activities: gold and silver refining, casting, jewellery fabrication, platinum-group-metal processing, gemstone cutting, and plated/coated/inlaid product manufacturing.

• Ministry of Commerce (MoC) retains authority over retail trade activities: jewellery

retail sales, bullion-dealer commerce licensing, consumer hallmarking complaints, and oversight of retail outlets.

The practical effect is that obtaining an industrial licence from MIM (via the "Sanai" platform) becomes a precondition for manufacturing activity. Existing unlicensed practitioners had until mid-April 2026 (six months from the October 16 implementation announcement) to regularise status. New standards introduced under the amended law include mandatory hallmarking requirements, gemstone identification tags, detailed advertising disclosure requirements, and consumer purchase documentation rules.

Significance for the Vision 2030 industrial-policy stack

The resolution is the institutional-alignment counterpart to the upstream architecture already consolidated under MIM: the Mining Investment Law M/140 (2020), the National Industrial Strategy (2022), the 9th Mining Exploration Licensing Round (2026), and the four SEZ implementing regulations (2026) all sit under MIM's mandate. By routing precious-metals manufacturing licensing through the same ministry, Saudi Arabia extends MIM's vertical integration from exploration and raw-mineral extraction through midstream refining and downstream jewellery fabrication — operationalising the mineral-to-manufacturing supply-chain value-capture that the National Industrial Strategy targets at the product-segment level.

Downstream implications

• Foreign jewellery-manufacturing investors and existing joint-venture operators (Ma'aden

gold refinery; Saudi gold-jewellery free-zone projects in Riyadh and Jeddah) now interface with MIM rather than MoC for manufacturing-side regulatory matters — materially changes their licensing pathways and industrial-incentive access.

• The "Sanai" industrial licensing platform (MIM's registration portal) becomes the single

point of entry for precious-metals manufacturing, potentially accelerating integration with broader NIDLP-style industrial incentives available to MIM licensees.

• Mandatory hallmarking and gemstone tagging standards will require supply-chain

documentation upgrades across the Saudi jewellery-manufacturing sector.

• The MoC–MIM split may generate transitional compliance complexity for vertically

integrated operators that both manufacture and retail precious metals products.

Open questions

• Whether the Umm al-Qura Gazette No. 5114 text specifies transitional provisions for

operators that held MoC manufacturing licences pre-Resolution 269.

• Whether MIM will issue separate implementing regulations (analogous to MoC's previous

executive regulations for the Precious Metals and Gemstones Law) to operationalise the new industrial-licence criteria.

• Timeline and criteria for NIDLP industrial incentives to be made explicitly available to

MIM-licensed precious-metals manufacturers.