ADNOC has launched an Industrial Resilience Program at Make it in the Emirates in Abu Dhabi, introducing five initiatives intended to move procurement toward UAE-manufactured supply. It sits alongside AED200bn of project awards planned for 2026 to 2028.
ADNOC has launched an Industrial Resilience Program at the opening of the fifth Make it in the Emirates forum in Abu Dhabi, setting out five mechanisms intended to shift its procurement toward goods manufactured in the UAE.
The programme comprises an enhanced In-Country Value model together with four instruments the company calls Local+, ICV+, the ADNOC Multiplier and Build-to-Demand, according to ADNOC. It sits alongside AED200bn of project awards the company plans between 2026 and 2028.
The scale of that award programme is what gives the mechanisms force. In-Country Value schemes across the Gulf have generally worked as scoring systems: a bidder accumulates points for local spend, and those points shift its evaluated position. The weakness of that design is that it rewards spend routed through a local entity rather than production that physically happens in the country, and a trading company can score well without a factory existing.
Naming a separate Build-to-Demand instrument alongside the ICV model points at that gap. Build-to-Demand, as the category is normally understood, means an offtake commitment sized to justify a plant — the buyer signals volume ahead of the investment so a manufacturer can finance capacity against contracted demand rather than against a forecast. That is the mechanism that actually produces factories, because the constraint on industrial investment is rarely the will to build; it is the absence of a customer willing to commit before the line exists.
The distinction matters for the categories ADNOC buys. Valves, pumps, pressure vessels, drilling consumables, cabling, electrical equipment and structural steel are all high-volume, repeat-purchase items with specifications stable enough to support a domestic production run. They are also the categories where a single large buyer's forward commitment is the difference between an import line and a plant.
Make it in the Emirates is the forum where the country's industrial strategy is announced and where its progress is measured. Operation 300bn, launched in 2021, targets raising the industrial sector's contribution to GDP from AED133bn to AED300bn by 2031, with support extending to more than 13,500 small and medium enterprises over the period and an Emirates Development Bank portfolio of AED30bn directed at priority industrial sectors.
For suppliers across the Gulf, the ADNOC programme is a signal about where the region's largest industrial buyers are heading. Saudi Arabia has been pursuing the same objective through licensing volume and local content requirements, and both markets are now asking the same question of a bidder: not how much was spent locally, but what was made locally. Manufacturers that hold assembly capacity in the region without upstream production are the ones this distinction reaches first.
ADNOC has not published the value thresholds or the qualification criteria attaching to the individual instruments.