Liang Qiqiang, known around the plant as Ah Qiang, has run a commercial lighting factory in Nanhai, Foshan, for thirteen years: eighty staff, more than six million US dollars of shipments a year, with Europe and Southeast Asia as the main battlefields. In March 2025 an engineering contractor in Riyadh ordered 6,000 forty-watt panel lights. Before the container was even booked, his first line was: send me the SABER PC certificate number first. Ah Qiang assumed this was Saudi Arabia version of CE. That one sentence turned into four months.
SABER is a platform, not a certification body
Get the relationships straight first. SASO is the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organization, and it is SASO that writes the technical regulations. SABER is the online platform SASO runs, operated day to day by Thiqah, and both applications and certificates are handled inside it. It became mandatory in January 2019 and was integrated with Saudi Customs Fasah system in July 2020, so the port validates the documents automatically.
You will not find a factory name on the platform, because the applicant is the Saudi importer. The importer needs a Saudi commercial licence whose scope covers trading in that product category. That is what cost Ah Qiang eleven days: his importer licence was written for building materials, with no lighting equipment in scope, and the PC application was rejected on submission.
Two certificates: PC for the product, SC for the shipment
PC stands for Product Certificate of Conformity. One certificate per model, valid for one year, and during that year the same model can ship as many times as you like. SC stands for Shipment Certificate of Conformity, one per consignment, and it can only be applied for against a valid PC. Its validity is 60 days. The trade calls them PCoC and SCoC.
There are three cost blocks, so do not let a single quotation blur them together. The platform levies only two official fees: PC at 500 Saudi riyals and SC at 350 riyals, both excluding 15% VAT, which makes 575 and 402.5. Payment goes through SADAD, biller code 144. Those are government fees and they are not refundable. The second block is the conformity assessment body file review fee, roughly 400 to 800 riyals, and it varies from one body to the next. The third block is testing, driven entirely by the product and the applicable standard; for lighting with photobiological safety and energy efficiency, tens of thousands of yuan is normal.
Memorise the dates. From 1 January 2025, the SC has to be issued before the goods arrive at a Saudi port; undertaking letters no longer count and an application filed after arrival is treated as invalid. From 1 October 2025, even products outside the technical regulations need an SC, and while self-declaration for non-regulated imports is free on the platform, the SC is still required. From 17 April 2025, some products need an additional approval from the Saudi Ministry of Commerce when applying for the PC. From 1 January 2026 the platform switched to new HS codes aligned with Saudi Customs, and old codes are rejected outright.
The gates a lighting product has to pass
Electrical safety runs through IECEE: a CB test report plus a CB certificate, with the report issued by a CBTL and the certificate by an NCB, after which SASO issues its national recognition certificate. Reports and certificates are valid for three years, but they must reflect the latest standard version, and the production models must cover Saudi national differences. The plug has to comply with SASO 2203, the British-style three-pin flat plug.
Ah Qiang lost time on 60 hertz. Saudi Arabia grid runs at 230 volts and 60 Hz; the UAE runs at 230 volts and 50 Hz. The CB report he already had only covered 50 Hz, SASO ruled that the national differences were not covered, and the retest cost him another two weeks.
Energy efficiency is the more urgent gate. Lighting goes through SASO 2870 and SASO 2902, which require an energy efficiency certificate and the EER label, and the label artwork has to be printed on the colour box. SASO 2902 was overhauled through 2024 and 2025: update registrations opened on 17 October 2024; after 1 April 2025 energy efficiency, IECEE and SABER applications failing the new standard were suspended; on 31 May 2025 non-compliant energy efficiency certificates were cancelled; and from 1 June 2025 all applications not meeting the new standard were scrapped. LED strip lights were hit hardest of all.
Ah Qiang colour boxes for the panel lights had already been printed, twenty thousand of them. The label artwork had to be redrawn to the new standard, and re-plating and reprinting cost 38,000 yuan and pushed delivery back twelve days.
One document gets missed more than any other: the Arabic user manual. Saudi Arabia accepts Arabic alone, or Arabic and English side by side, and the manual must carry the safety instructions and the specific model number. Nameplates need the country of origin on them. Machine translation gets bounced nine times out of ten.
The UAE is a different system: ECAS mandatory, EQM voluntary
Plenty of factory owners assume one Gulf certificate covers the whole region. It is the most expensive misunderstanding in this market. A Saudi SABER certificate is not accepted in the UAE, and a UAE ECAS certificate is not accepted in Saudi Arabia.
The UAE is regulated by MoIAT, the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology. ECAS is the mandatory product certification scheme: regulated products must hold an ECAS certificate, valid for one year and renewed annually, and each consignment also needs a certificate of conformity. Lighting products, low-voltage electrical equipment, RoHS, the EESL energy efficiency label, low-voltage cables, data cables, e-cigarettes, audio-visual and IT products are all on the list. Lighting has its own Cabinet Resolution requiring both the ECAS certificate and the energy efficiency label, and it set a registration window of 180 days.
EQM, the Emirates Quality Mark, is voluntary except for bottled drinking water. It runs for three years, and the price of it is a factory assessment, a quality system review and annual surveillance audits. If you want EQM as a selling point, go for it. If you only need to clear customs, ECAS is enough.
ECAS has hard entry conditions: the importer needs a UAE trade licence, test reports must come from an accredited laboratory, the technical file must be in English, manuals must be bilingual Arabic and English, and the product must carry the ECAS mark. MoIAT has also tightened one rule: open model numbers such as FL-* are treated as non-compliant and certificates carrying them are cancelled, so every model has to be listed individually. Ah Qiang first ECAS application carried three series numbers with asterisks. It was sent back, and he re-listed seventeen specific models.
Cycle times, costs, and the five most common rejections
For a SABER PC, with complete documents and test reports already in hand, five to ten working days. If retesting or an energy label change is needed, add three to six weeks. The SC is quick, one to two working days. UAE ECAS generally runs two to six weeks, and EQM with a factory audit takes three to six months.
Ah Qiang numbers for this round: 46,000 yuan to complete the CB report and the energy efficiency testing; IECEE conversion at 340 US dollars per model across seventeen models; agency service fees of 2,800 yuan per certificate; 38,000 yuan to reprint the colour boxes; and nine days of cargo sitting in Jeddah, with 2,400 US dollars of container detention plus storage at 300 to 500 riyals a day. Spread across the containers, compliance came to roughly 3,000 yuan per container. He raised his quote by 2.7% and the customer did not push back, because on an engineering order the customer is really buying on-time delivery.
Document mismatches come first. One letter different between the model number on the invoice and the model number on the PC certificate, and the SC will not issue. Fixing the invoice takes at least a day, and by then the cargo is already at sea.
Test reports being refused come second. An outdated standard version, a CB certificate older than three years, missing pages, a report that only covered 50 Hz without the Saudi national differences, or a laboratory that is not recognised. SABER rejects all of them and a retest is the only route back.
Factory audits come third. Auto parts and building materials are treated as higher risk and require an on-site audit; certification for a single product can run 15,000 to 30,000 yuan with a three-month timeline.
The last two are the energy label artwork not printed on the colour box, and the importer licence scope being wrong. The first costs money. The second is fatal, because with the wrong licence every document you prepared is waste paper.
Five things to settle before you quote the Middle East
First, confirm that the importer holds a licence and that the scope matches. Fail this and everything else is wasted effort.
Second, check the edition and the year of every test report. Expired standards, uncovered national differences and non-compliant plugs account for most of the rejections.
Third, allow enough time for labels and manuals. A wrong colour box costs tens of thousands of yuan, and a manual without Arabic is a stack of waste paper.
Fourth, budget Saudi Arabia and the UAE separately. Two sets of certificates, two sets of fees, two rounds of testing. Do not quote two markets off one number.
Fifth, always secure the SC before arrival. Fixing it at the port turns a counter fee into a port fee, and it is not a small multiple.
Frequently Asked Questions
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