Text of report in English by Saudi newspaper Arab News website on 28 March
Jedda: Shams Radio Consortium won the Kingdom’s fifth FM radio licence on Saturday with its 60m-riyal [16m US dollars] bid.
The government has received a total of 331.5m riyals for issuing five FM radio licences.
Riyadh Najm, undersecretary for engineering affairs and supervisor of organizing audiovisual media at the Ministry of Culture and Information, said the five radio stations would start airing programmes in Riyadh, Jedda and Dammam in six months.
“They will later cover 160 cities across the Kingdom,” Najm said. He said a number of consortiums had competed for the fifth licence.
“Shams made the highest offer of 54.99m riyals, which was below the minimum ceiling of 60m riyals. The licence was awarded after the consortium agreed to raise the offer,” he said.
(Source: Arab News website, Jedda, in English 28 Mar 10 via BBC Monitoring)
