UAE industrial exports reached AED262bn ($71.3bn) in 2025, a quarter up on the previous year, Sultan Al Jaber told the opening of Make it in the Emirates. The forum also put $50bn of procurement behind localising more than 5,000 products. The advanced end of the base is concentrated in defence, aerospace structures and pharmaceuticals.
UAE industrial exports reached AED262bn - about $71.3bn - in 2025, a quarter more than the previous year and more than double the level recorded when the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology was created in 2020. Sultan Al Jaber, Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, gave the figure at the opening of the fifth Make it in the Emirates forum in Abu Dhabi, where 1,245 exhibitors took floor space at ADNEC.
The wider measure moved with it. The industrial sector's contribution to national GDP is up close to 70 per cent since 2021, when the country launched Operation 300bn, the ten-year programme designed to raise industry's share of output from AED133bn to AED300bn by 2031. The sector contributed AED190bn in 2024, so the remaining distance to the target is about AED110bn over six years.
The mechanism the UAE has chosen to close that gap is procurement rather than subsidy. The centrepiece announcement of the forum was $50bn - AED180bn - of new industrial purchasing opportunities opened to domestic manufacturers, covering the localisation of more than 5,000 individual products. Around it, the event produced AED171bn ($46.6bn) of aggregate agreements, of which AED48.5bn was investment and AED19.2bn financing.
Guaranteeing demand is a defensible way to build an industrial base in a small economy. A manufacturer will not tool up for a market it might win; it will tool up for a purchase order from a national oil company, a utility or a defence ministry with a decade of volume behind it. The corollary is that the resulting factories are tied to those buyers, and the durability of the base depends on whether they can eventually sell to anyone else.
The financing side was filled in at the same event. The ministry signed memoranda with Mashreq for AED10bn over five years and Dubai Islamic Bank for AED2bn, while Emirates Development Bank allocated a further AED6bn, drawing on the AED30bn portfolio it has earmarked for priority industrial sectors. Bank appetite of that kind matters more than headline investment totals, because the constraint on a mid-sized industrial project in the Gulf is usually term debt rather than equity.
Where the country's advanced manufacturing is genuinely deep, it is deep in defence. EDGE Group, the Abu Dhabi conglomerate that consolidated the UAE's defence industrial holdings, set out its position at the forum: revenue of about $5.06bn for 2025, new orders of $7.96bn and a backlog of $20.4bn, with more than 80 per cent of its systems now produced inside the country. It also reported completing more than 68 Industry 4.0 projects during the year, doubling production capacity across 13 of its operating entities, and AED596m of local added value. A backlog four times revenue is the profile of a manufacturer with committed work well past the current planning horizon.
Aerospace is the second area with real depth, and it is older. Strata Manufacturing, the Mubadala-owned composites business at Al Ain, has been building primary and secondary aerostructures for Boeing and Airbus for over a decade - the kind of certified, traceable work that takes years of audit to qualify for and is correspondingly hard to lose. The plant has since extended upstream into advanced materials with Syensqo, producing composite material at Al Ain rather than importing it, which is the more difficult half of an aerospace supply chain to localise.
Pharmaceuticals is the newest of the three and the one moving fastest, shifting from secondary packaging and generic formulation toward vaccines, oncology products and sterile injectables. That step change is significant industrially: sterile fill-finish and biologics require cleanroom construction, validated utilities and regulatory approval regimes that ordinary process plants do not, and they place a UAE facility in a much smaller global peer group.
The obvious gap is semiconductors. The UAE has no volume chip fabrication. Abu Dhabi's economic development department lists the sector among its growth priorities and discussions with international chipmakers have been reported, but nothing has been committed, and the reason is arithmetic rather than ambition: a single leading-edge fabrication plant costs somewhere between $20bn and $40bn and depends on an ecosystem of specialist suppliers, water and power that takes a decade to assemble. Electronics assembly is a plausible near-term route; front-end fabrication is not.
The build-out is also not confined to Abu Dhabi. Sharjah used the same forum to report AED3.51bn of industrial investment over five years, a reminder that the northern emirates hold a large share of the country's mid-market manufacturing in food, packaging, plastics and building materials - lower-technology work, but the volume employer and the customer base for most of the localisation programme.
The question the export figure does not answer is what is inside it. A 25 per cent rise in a year can reflect new products, higher volumes of the same aluminium, steel and petrochemicals, or better prices for them. Operation 300bn will be judged on the first of those, and the evidence for it will show up not in the export total but in what the country makes that it could not make five years ago.