Abu Dhabi's GDP reached AED325.7bn in the third quarter of 2025, its highest quarterly value on record, with the non-oil economy growing 7.6 per cent. Manufacturing contributed AED30.5bn of that, the largest non-oil sector, but it is expanding at 2 to 3 per cent a year against a strategy that calls for the sector to more than double by 2031.
Abu Dhabi's economy grew 7.7 per cent in the third quarter of 2025 to reach AED325.7bn at constant prices, the highest quarterly figure the emirate has recorded, with the non-oil side of that economy expanding 7.6 per cent. The numbers, published by the Statistics Centre - Abu Dhabi, are the clearest read yet on a shift the emirate has been engineering for more than a decade: growth that no longer comes out of the barrel.
Across the first nine months of 2025, Abu Dhabi's GDP rose 5 per cent year on year while the non-oil economy grew 6.8 per cent. In the second quarter, non-oil activity reached AED174.1bn and 56.8 per cent of total output - the first time it had accounted for more than half of GDP in a second quarter, according to the same statistical series.
Manufacturing does more of that work than any other non-oil sector. It generated AED30.5bn of value added in the third quarter, 9.4 per cent of GDP, on growth of 2.4 per cent. In the second quarter it had reached AED30.1bn and 9.8 per cent of GDP, the highest quarterly value the sector had then recorded, on growth of 3.1 per cent. Nothing else in the non-oil economy is that large: not construction, not transport, not financial services.
The policy behind those figures is the Abu Dhabi Industrial Strategy, launched by Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan with AED10bn of government investment across six programmes - talent development, Industry 4.0, circular economy, ecosystem enablement, homegrown supply chain and value chain development. Its stated targets for 2031 are to more than double the size of the manufacturing sector to AED172bn, create 13,600 skilled jobs and raise the emirate's non-oil exports by 143 per cent to AED178.8bn.
Set the target against the quarterly series and the scale of what is being asked becomes visible. The two measures are not constructed on the same basis - AED172bn is the strategy's own measure of sector size, not the value-added figure the statisticians publish - but manufacturing value added is currently running at roughly AED120bn a year and growing at 2 to 3 per cent. On any reading, the trajectory implied by the strategy is several times the pace the sector is delivering now. The gap is not a reason to doubt the direction; it is the reason the government is spending AED10bn to change it.
What Abu Dhabi actually sells to industrial investors is not cash. It is serviced land, power, a customs perimeter and a berth. The Khalifa Economic Zones Abu Dhabi group is the vehicle for most of it, operating the emirate's integrated trade, logistics and industrial estate alongside Khalifa Port, and it has been organised into specialised clusters - a metals park, an automotive and mobility city, an agricultural technology park and a food hub - so that a tenant arrives next to its suppliers and its customers rather than on an undifferentiated plot. For a mid-sized manufacturer, a 25 to 50-year lease on connected land beside a deepwater port is a more decisive incentive than a tax holiday.
The early evidence is in the registry rather than the accounts. Abu Dhabi reports that the industrial strategy has lifted industrial GDP by 23 per cent since 2022 and increased the number of industrial enterprises in the emirate by 19.4 per cent. Those are counts of activity forming, which is what an industrial policy produces first; value added follows once plants are commissioned and running at rate, typically two to four years after a lease is signed.
Two caveats sit under the headline numbers and both matter. The first is arithmetic: the non-oil share of GDP rises when non-oil activity grows, and it also rises when oil output is held down. Abu Dhabi's hydrocarbon sector remains around 43 per cent of the economy, and the share shifts with production policy as well as with diversification. The second is composition. Much of the emirate's existing industrial base is downstream of hydrocarbons and cheap power - petrochemicals, aluminium, steel, industrial gases. That is real manufacturing and it employs real engineers, but it is a form of resource conversion rather than a departure from the resource.
The harder half of the programme is therefore the part that does not depend on feedstock: automotive components, pharmaceuticals, aerospace structures, electronics, machinery. Those sectors compete on skills, supply chain depth and logistics rather than on input cost, which is precisely why they are slower to attract and slower to scale. They are also the sectors that would make the AED178.8bn non-oil export target achievable, because they generate exportable goods that do not track the oil price.
For contractors and equipment suppliers, the practical consequence of the third-quarter figures is that the industrial construction pipeline in Abu Dhabi is being underwritten by a policy with a number attached to it and a decade to run. The plants being built now are mostly modest by Gulf standards - single-plot facilities of 30,000 to 90,000 square metres rather than complexes. Enough of them, consistently, is what the strategy's arithmetic requires.