French RATP to hire 3,500 people in Saudi to drive its foreign growth

French state-owned public transport firm, RATP, will hire around 3,500 people in Saudi Arabia in the coming months, said the company’s unit head in an interview with Reuters.

Laurence Batlle, who heads the RATP Dev unit, which spearheads RATP's expansion abroad and in France outside Paris, said: “Out of the 3,500 hires, 2,500 will be for the bus network, including 100 female drivers in a country where women were not allowed to drive until earlier this year.”

One of RATP's biggest foreign projects is in Riyadh, where it won a 12-year, EUR 1.7 billion contract to start up a bus network and an EUR 2 billion, 12-year contract to operate two of six planned metro lines.

"Our first buses in Riyadh will ride in 2019," said Batlle.