Oman has signed investment agreements worth more than OMR200m for industrial projects in the Duqm Special Economic Zone, Salalah Free Zone and Khazaen Economic City. They include a steel mould plant by Alshaya Group at Duqm worth OMR41m.
Oman has signed agreements for new industrial projects worth more than OMR200m across its economic and free zones, according to the Public Authority for Special Economic Zones and Free Zones.
The projects are spread across the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, Salalah Free Zone and Khazaen Economic City, and span steel, construction products, materials for electric vehicles and pharmaceuticals. The largest single item is a steel mould manufacturing plant at Duqm by Kuwait's Alshaya Group, carrying investment of OMR41m.
The mix is worth reading carefully, because it is not the mix a country builds when it is chasing export markets. Steel moulds, construction products and pharmaceuticals are all categories where regional demand already exists and is currently met by imports. A plant serving that demand competes on freight cost and lead time rather than on scale, which is the position a smaller industrial base can defend.
Duqm is the anchor of the three. It sits on the Arabian Sea outside the Strait of Hormuz, with a deepwater port, a refinery and land allocated at a scale Oman's older industrial areas cannot match. Its geography is the specific commercial argument: cargo reaching Duqm does not transit the strait, which prices differently for anything where routing risk has to be insured.
Salalah and Khazaen serve different functions. Salalah is a container transhipment port of long standing with free zone land behind it, so manufacturing there sits next to existing liner services. Khazaen, inland near Muscat, is closer to domestic consumption and to the road corridor toward the UAE, which suits products distributed regionally by truck rather than shipped.
The inclusion of electric vehicle materials is the forward-looking element. That category — battery components, cathode and anode materials, and the metals processing feeding them — is where several Gulf states are attempting to establish positions simultaneously, and it depends on access to mineral feedstock and to cheap continuous power more than on labour cost.
Set against its neighbours, Oman's industrial base is small: it counts around 1,932 factories against Saudi Arabia's 9,094 and the UAE's 7,328, with total industrial investment of roughly $25.3bn. Additions of this size register against that base in a way they would not in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, and the zones are the mechanism through which most of Oman's industrial growth is now routed.
Construction contracts for the announced plants have not been awarded.