On 1 November, Saudi Arabia's SASO stops accepting its old ICT standard for new certificates: coverage now follows what a device does, not its customs code, and certificates issued under the old standard stay valid only until March

What changes, and on which date

Nothing changes for products already on the Saudi market with a valid Certificate of Conformity. What changes is which standard a new or renewed certificate has to satisfy, and that depends on the date the certificate is issued, not the date the product was made or shipped. SASO opened a grace period that keeps GEN-002 usable for new certificates through 31 October 2026. From 1 November 2026, SABER stops issuing new Certificates of Conformity against GEN-002 for in-scope devices: every new certificate has to meet SASO 3114:2026 instead. Certificates issued before that date under GEN-002 are not cancelled immediately; they keep their validity until SASO's own cutoff of 31 March 2027, after which they are discontinued and the product needs a SASO 3114:2026 certificate to keep clearing SABER.

Compliance firms advising exporters describe the scope consistently: mobile phones and tablets, mobile computers, routers and customer premises equipment, optical network terminals and home access gateways, and Wi-Fi distribution devices. None of the sources reviewed for this article give a single official product list with HS codes attached, which is itself part of the story below.

Classification runs on what a device does, not on its customs code

Many compliance teams work from the customs tariff code (the HS code) a shipment clears under, then map that code to the regulations that typically attach to it. Firms advising on SASO 3114:2026 describe a scope that does not follow that shortcut: which standard applies is decided by what the device actually does, not by the tariff heading used to import it. A handset, a Wi-Fi distribution device and a device that bundles routing and cellular functions together can share a customs heading for telephone or network equipment while landing on different sides of the SASO 3114:2026 boundary, because the standard is built around device function rather than tariff classification.

That is the gap a customs-code-first compliance process misses: a declared-value or tariff-heading match at the border says nothing about whether a specific SKU needs a SASO 3114:2026 certificate from 1 November, or can still rely on a GEN-002 certificate until March 2027. The determination has to be made product by product, from the device's actual function.

Why it matters for brands

During the transition, the same SKU can be compliant under two different standards at the same time, because the relevant fact is the certificate's issue date, not the unit's manufacture date. A batch certified on 28 October 2026 keeps its GEN-002 paperwork valid until 31 March 2027; the next batch of the identical product, certified on 2 November because its certificate lapsed or needed renewal, needs a SASO 3114:2026 certificate instead. Brands selling phones, routers, mesh Wi-Fi kits, ONT or HAG hardware into Saudi Arabia, directly or through distributors, need their SABER technical files and import records to carry which standard each certificate was issued against and its issue date, not just a pass or fail compliance flag. Without that, a compliance team cannot tell, SKU by SKU, which units still rely on a certificate that stops being accepted after March 2027, and which were never eligible for GEN-002 at all because their function places them inside SASO 3114:2026's scope regardless of how the product was classified at customs.

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