South Korea’s leading cybersecurity company, AhnLab, established a joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE), a cybersecurity and cloud service company fully backed by Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), to expand its presence in the Middle East. AhnLab will hold a 25% stake in the joint venture, and SITE will own the remaining 75%. The goal is to launch the joint venture within the first half of this year.
Additionally, SITE Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of SITE, will acquire a 10% stake in AhnLab for an estimated $55 million (74.4 billion won). After the payment is completed by the end of June this year, SITE Ventures will become the company’s second-largest shareholder after Ahn Cheol-soo, the founder of AhnLab. Partnerships between so-called “oil money” nations, such as Saudi Arabia and UAE, and South Korean tech companies have blossomed in the past few years. These Middle Eastern countries, traditionally heavily reliant on the oil sector, are diversifying into high-tech fields, finding common ground with Korean tech companies looking for new markets and investment opportunities. Korean tech giants such as Naver and Nexon, alongside several startups, have secured investments from these oil-rich nations to broaden their market reach. Naver has been particularly active in the region. Naver announced that the company recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Aramco Digital, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco, to foster digital innovation in the Middle East and North Africa. The partnership focuses on developing artificial intelligence (AI) models based on the Arabic large-scale language model (LLM). Source: Chosun
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