On March 28, 2021, Zhongman Petroleum and Natural Gas Group Corp. Ltd. (ZPEC ) and Saudi Arabia Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) signed a 120M USD contract (~787M RMB) for drilling projects. This marks ZPEC’s entry into the Saudi drilling engineering market, which is recognized as the highest threshold in the world. This is a historic breakthrough as, until now, ZPEC is the first and only Chinese private drilling enterprise to cooperate with Saudi Aramco.

As early as 2014, in order to optimize the overseas market and promote its strategic drilling market, ZPEC strove to enter the high-end markets like Saudi and Kuwait through hard work and effort.  In 2018, ZPEC passed the Saudi Aramco’s prequalification and became the only Chinese private drilling company in Saudi Aramco’s Drilling Project Vendor List.

The Saudi Arabia market is high in line with the company's market layout expectations. First, it’s a huge market with high production capacity, the future workload is guaranteed; second, the client is rich in funds and, with a great reputation, the contract period is usually longer than in other markets with on-time payments; third, in Saudi the barrel oil costs are lower than other markets, thus it’s rarely affected by oil price fluctuations; and fourth, the market entry threshold is high, thus bringing less competition while providing guaranteed benefits. 

Saudi Aramco is the world's largest oil and gas company with its business covering the whole world. It is mainly engaged in oil exploration, development, production, refining, transportation and sales, with the world's largest onshore and offshore oil fields. As the biggest oil and gas giant, Saudi Aramco has abundant oil and gas resources, much higher than other international oil and gas giants. By 2019, its crude oil proven reserves were 198.569 billion barrels, gas proven reserves of 190.58 trillion cubic feet, and total oil and gas reserves of 256.055 billion barrels of oil equivalent.