Unibio International plc reports a strategic KPI it calls the indicated demand pipeline. Its own definition, printed beside the number in the audited annual report, is: “Aggregate annual tonnage covered by signed letters of intent and memoranda of understanding. The leading indicator that converts into firm off-take agreements.”
At 31 December 2025 that number was 48,000 tonnes a year. A year earlier it was 46,000.
The plant Unibio and the Saudi Industrial Investment Group are building at Al Jubail will produce 50,000 tonnes a year at first phase. Nowhere in the 82-page annual report is a firm offtake agreement disclosed.
That is the whole of the demand side of the world’s largest announced single-cell protein project: a pipeline of letters of intent and MOUs that has grown by 2,000 tonnes in a year, and which the company itself describes as the thing that converts into offtake rather than offtake itself.
Methodology
All Unibio figures below are taken from the group accounts of Unibio International plc (company number 09209174) for the year ended 31 December 2025, filed at Companies House on 11 July 2026, signed by the directors on 11 May 2026 and audited by Deloitte LLP. Amounts are as reported, in thousands of pounds sterling.
The filing is a scanned document, so every figure used here was checked by reconciling it against the statement’s own subtotals. Revenue, other income and cost of sales sum to the stated gross profit; the expense lines sum to the stated operating loss; the balance sheet components sum to total equity and to total equity and liabilities; the cash flow categories sum to the stated net cash flow and reconcile opening to closing cash; and the joint venture note’s assets and liabilities sum to its stated net assets. Any figure that failed those checks is flagged at the end rather than used.
Because the filing is a scan rather than machine-readable text, passages quoted from the accounts are transcriptions. Obvious optical-recognition artefacts have been corrected to the plainly intended word; no wording has been changed otherwise, and any figure whose reading was uncertain is flagged below rather than used.
Project figures come from SIIG’s statement to Tadawul as reported by Argaam on 15 March 2026, and from Unibio’s own press release.
What the project is, on the record
| Item | Disclosed | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Al Jubail Industrial City, Saudi Arabia | SIIG statement; Unibio release |
| Vehicle | BioProtein Company Limited (“BPCL”), incorporated in Saudi Arabia, established during 2025 | Unibio accounts, note 4.4 |
| Ownership | SIIG 80%, Unibio 20% | Both |
| Initial estimated cost | About SAR 1.4 billion | SIIG statement to Tadawul |
| Initial capacity | 50,000 tonnes a year, with plans to exceed 300,000 tonnes | Both |
| Feedstock | Dry gas allocation from the Saudi Ministry of Energy | Both |
| Construction | On site in H2 2026, completion H2 2027 | SIIG statement |
| Pilot production | H2 2027, with six months of trial operations | SIIG statement |
| Earnings impact | Likely to begin showing during 2028 | SIIG statement |
| Funding | SIIG internal resources plus commercial and government financial institutions | SIIG statement |
The joint venture’s name has not appeared in the trade coverage of this project. It appears in Unibio’s accounts, and it is the entity that will hold the plant.
Practical consequence: if you are tracking this project, track BPCL. Unibio’s equity accounting gives you one window on it each year, and it is the only public one.
The vehicle’s balance sheet
Note 4.4 of Unibio’s accounts gives BPCL’s summarised financial information for 2025, its first period.
| BPCL at 31 December 2025 | £000 |
|---|---|
| Current assets | 23,099 |
| of which cash and cash equivalents | 22,902 |
| Non-current assets | 9,542 |
| Current liabilities | (8,379) |
| Net assets | 24,262 |
| Revenue | — |
| Loss from continuing operations | (434) |
Unibio’s 20% share of those net assets is stated as £4,852,000, reduced by £91,000 of foreign exchange adjustment to a carrying value of £4,761,000. Unibio’s cash flow statement shows £4,886,000 invested in joint ventures during the year.
So at the last audited balance sheet date — seven months before construction was due to start — the company that will build a plant SIIG has costed at SAR 1.4 billion held net assets of £24.3 million, of which £22.9 million was cash, and had no revenue.
This is not by itself a problem. SIIG told Tadawul the project will be funded from its own resources and from commercial and government lenders, which is how petrochemical-scale projects in the Kingdom are normally financed, and SIIG is a listed industrial group with a balance sheet Unibio does not have. The observation is narrower and worth stating precisely: the equity standing behind this project at the end of 2025 was a small fraction of its approved cost, and no debt facility for it has been publicly announced.
Practical consequence: the financial close, not the groundbreaking, is the event that de-risks this project. Watch for a disclosed facility rather than for a construction photograph.
Unibio’s own accounts
The 20% partner reported revenue for the first time in 2025.
| Unibio International plc, group | 2025 (£000) | 2024 (£000) |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 982 | — |
| Other income | 1,957 | 56 |
| Cost of sales | (24) | (371) |
| Gross profit | 2,915 | (315) |
| Operating loss | (10,106) | (13,552) |
| Loss for the year | (9,988) | (10,454) |
| Cash and cash equivalents | 24,672 | 40,096 |
| Total equity | 35,009 | 43,206 |
| Retained losses | (80,438) | (70,448) |
Two lines deserve attention.
The revenue is engineering services, and the customer is the joint venture. Note 2.1 records all £982,000 of external revenue under a single product line, “engineering services”, recognised over time under IFRS 15. The KPI table describes the same figure as “Revenue from engineering services to the joint venture and development partners.”
Most of the other income is also the joint venture. Note 2.2 breaks £1,957,000 down as £1,674,000 “recharge of pre-joint venture expenditure”, £242,000 recovery of previously written-off receivables, and £41,000 of grants.
Take those together and roughly £2.66 million of the group’s £2.94 million of revenue and other income in 2025 — about 90% — relates to the joint venture rather than to selling Uniprotein. The transition the KPI table describes as moving “from pre-revenue technology development to a commercial business” is, on the face of the notes, a transition to billing its own 80%-owned partner vehicle.
Cash tells the plainer story: £49.1 million at the start of 2024, £40.1 million at the start of 2025, £24.7 million at the end of it. Against £107.0 million of share premium raised and £80.4 million of accumulated losses, the group has spent roughly three-quarters of what it has raised.
The going concern position is clean. The directors’ liquidity disclosure states that cash flow projections at the year end indicated the group expected to have sufficient liquid resources to meet its obligations under all reasonably expected circumstances for at least twelve months from the date of signing. The accounts carry no material uncertainty.
The events-after note nobody has reported
Under note 7.5, “Events after the reporting period”, the directors wrote:
“At the signing of the annual report, the level of geopolitical risk in the Middle East is at a heightened level. This could potentially impact the timelines that are currently built into the strategic roadmap for the Group and the ability to start commercial production in 2028. Amongst the key elements that could impact our project activities in the region are currency volatility, credit availability, operational conditions for employees and contractors and the overall execution of the project management required during the construction phase.”
And: “Until there is greater clarity, steps have been taken to ensure that employee safety is maintained by suspending all travel to the region.”
That is dated 11 May 2026. Three months before the annual report was filed, and roughly two months before construction was due to begin, the board of the technology partner told Companies House that the 2028 production date might not hold and that its staff were not travelling to Saudi Arabia. Its own paragraph names credit availability among the risks — the same funding question the balance sheet raises.
The directors also say: “We remain committed to executing the projects under the timelines currently agreed with our partners but are resolved to respond to any adverse events in a timely manner to protect the interests of all shareholders and other stakeholders.”
Practical consequence: this is the most specific public statement anyone has made about slippage risk on this project, and it comes from the party with the technology. Anyone modelling 2028 single-cell protein supply should weight the plant accordingly.
Three published timelines
| Source | Construction | Production |
|---|---|---|
| SIIG, to Tadawul (March 2026) | On site H2 2026, complete H2 2027 | Pilot H2 2027 plus six months of trials; earnings impact from 2028 |
| Unibio press release | Begins H2 2026 | Commercialisation from 2028 |
| Green Queen (March 2026) | Begins H2 2026, complete mid-2027 | “Commercial production in the first half of 2026” |
The first two are consistent. The third is not internally consistent — it places commercial production before construction completes — and the same article dates SIIG’s $70 million investment in Unibio to 2017, where Unibio’s own release dates it to 2023 and SIIG’s acquisition of its 24% stake was reported in the same period. The $373 million figure that has since circulated widely is Green Queen’s conversion of SAR 1.4 billion at the riyal’s long-standing peg of 3.75 to the US dollar; the underlying SAR figure is SIIG’s own.
Practical consequence: cite SAR 1.4 billion and the Tadawul statement, not the dollar figure and the secondary coverage. The conversion is sound; the article carrying it has other errors.
The counter-argument
The case for reading this optimistically is real and should be stated properly.
SIIG is not a startup. It is a listed Saudi industrial group with petrochemical operating experience, it holds 24% of Unibio, and it has committed 80% of a project its own board has approved. A gas allocation from the Ministry of Energy is not a soft asset — it is the input contract that decides whether gas fermentation economics work at all, and it is the thing most projects in this space never obtain. The site was nominated by the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu. Front-end engineering design was completed before the announcement, which puts this ahead of most announced fermentation capacity, including projects we have covered that turned out to be agreements to explore a plant.
Letters of intent are also the normal state of a demand book at this stage. Nobody signs firm offtake for tonnes that will not exist for two years, and our own survey of alternative protein offtake agreements found signed demand routinely running ahead of capacity rather than behind it. A 48,000-tonne indicated pipeline against 50,000 tonnes of first-phase capacity could equally be read as a plant sized to its market.
The narrower claim survives all of that. Unibio publishes a demand metric and defines it honestly as pre-contractual. It does not publish a firm offtake figure. Until it does, the demand side of this project is unverified, and the company’s own KPI table is the evidence for that, not our inference.
Why this pattern matters
We have now covered three gas fermentation projects at industrial scale in a month, and the shape repeats. Calysta’s Calysseo joint venture in Chongqing — 20,000 tonnes of nameplate capacity against $710,000 of 2025 revenue — halted production after its 80% partner declined to renew a loan. Our survey of gas fermentation’s food and feed split found the only industrial-scale plant making animal feed rather than food.
In both Calysseo and BPCL the structure is the same: a minority technology partner, a majority industrial partner with the balance sheet, and a plant whose viability depends on the majority partner continuing to fund it. Calysseo is what that structure looks like when the majority partner stops. It is not a prediction about BPCL — SIIG’s position and Saudi Arabia’s feedstock advantage are not Adisseo’s position in Chongqing — but it is the specific risk the structure carries, and it is why the funding question above is the one to watch.
What we could not establish
- BPCL’s capital commitments. Unibio’s contingent liabilities note (7.2) discloses only a Danish joint-taxation arrangement. No capital commitment for the Jubail plant appears in Unibio’s accounts. Under equity accounting it would not be required to appear there; the commitment sits at BPCL and, potentially, in SIIG’s own disclosures, which we did not obtain in full.
- A £3,000 difference we could not reconcile. The joint venture note states Unibio’s 20% share of BPCL’s loss as £87,000, consistent with 20% of the £434,000 loss. The face of the income statement reads £84,000 and the cash flow statement £85,000. On a scanned filing at this scale the difference may be a transcription artefact rather than a real inconsistency. We have used the JV note’s figures and flag the discrepancy rather than resolve it.
- The exchange rate. Unibio reports in sterling and the project is costed in riyals. We have not applied a year-end rate, so no direct ratio between the JV’s net assets and the project cost is stated above.
- Related-party framing. SIIG’s Tadawul statement, as reported by Argaam, says “there are no related parties to the deal”, while Unibio’s note 7.3 lists SIIG as a shareholder with 24% and BPCL as a joint venture. These are different disclosure regimes with different tests and the two statements are not necessarily inconsistent; we could not establish how the Saudi test applies here.
- Whether anything has changed since 11 May 2026. The accounts are signed as at that date. We found no later Unibio or SIIG disclosure updating the travel suspension, the construction start, or the demand pipeline.
- The press release date. Unibio’s announcement page carries no publication date. We have dated the announcement by SIIG’s Tadawul statement of 15 March 2026 and contemporaneous coverage.
What to watch
Whether the indicated demand pipeline converts. Unibio publishes this KPI annually and defines conversion explicitly. If the FY2026 accounts show a firm offtake line where there is now only a pipeline, the demand side is answered. If the pipeline moves another 2,000 tonnes and no offtake line appears, it is not.
Whether a debt facility is announced. SIIG named commercial and government financial institutions as funding sources in March 2026. Financial close is the test of the SAR 1.4 billion figure. Until then it is a board approval.
Whether the travel suspension is lifted, and whether 2028 holds. The directors put both in writing. Unibio’s FY2026 accounts, due around mid-2027, will say whether the roadmap survived — and by then construction should be nearing the completion date SIIG gave.
Whether the second phase is ever mentioned again. The move from 50,000 to “over 300,000 tonnes” is the number that makes this the world’s largest by a wide margin. It appears in the press release and not in the Tadawul statement, which covers 50,000 tonnes. Watch whether the larger figure reappears anywhere with a cost attached.