IPO pipeline deserves a country equity story

If I have learned anything in the last 20 years at the intersection of communications and financial markets, it is that every IPO tells a story that goes beyond the numbers. Not only about the company going public per se, but also about the country behind it and the industry in which it operates.
And when a country like Oman launches six major IPOs in three years, raises over $4 billion from international and domestic investors, sets up an international financial centre under English common law and brings its public debt down from 60 per cent of GDP to 35 per cent, what it is conveying (whether it realises it or not) is a country story.
More or less consciously.
I have worked all over the world and participated in IPOs in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and emerging markets; and I have seen few economies as solid as Oman's.
And few countries have the market activity that Oman has at the moment, where I travel quite frequently and have had the chance to see this transformation take shape on the ground, in conversations, in the confidence of the local financial community and in the speed at which things are moving.
Over the last three years, some national champions have made themselves available to investors.
In recent years, Abraj Energy Services went public with an 8.7 times oversubscribed offering, OQ Exploration & Production raised $2 billion, Oman's largest IPO on record and the biggest Gulf listing since Adnoc Gas in 2023; and Asyad Shipping was listed in 2025, raising $333 million last year and bringing Oman's maritime sector to the stock market for the first time. Just to name a few.
The Oman Investment Authority, which manages more than $50 billion in assets, has launched an ambitious privatisation programme affecting dozens of its 160 affiliated companies. Oman India Fertiliser, Minerals Development Oman and others are in the pipeline and are almost ready to go public.
The creation of the Oman International Financial Centre in Madinat Al Irfan, announced by Royal Decree in early 2026, adds another dimension to this commitment. The IFCO is supposed to operate under English common law, with its own courts and regulator, offering international investors a familiar framework for accessing the Omani market.
The MSX closed 2025 as the best-performing market in the GCC, with a 28.2% return on the MSX30 index. Trading volumes quadrupled. Market capitalisation now exceeds $87 billion, up 51% from 2020. Oman has regained investment-grade credit ratings from Fitch, S&P and Moody's. Public debt has fallen from over 60% of GDP in 2020 to approximately 35% in 2025. Listed companies posted combined profits of RO 881 million in the first half of 2025, a 20% year-on-year increase.
These are spectacular figures. And yet, foreign investors still account for less than 15% of MSX's trading volume. The MSX remains classified by MSCI as a frontier market. The barrier is not regulatory — 100% foreign ownership is allowed in almost all publicly traded companies — or performance. The barrier is narrative.
The problem is not execution. It is how financial work is viewed. All of these transactions are carried out by bankers who do not take financial communication seriously. It's all numbers and ratios. The prospectuses have described businesses and highlighted very large figures, with grand industrial ideas about how much we will build, buy, produce, extract, or export. But they have not been framed within a national narrative. None has promoted Oman as a financial destination. There is a lack of a coordinated narrative linking the macroeconomic story with the microeconomic opportunity.
Above all, no consideration has been given to Oman's strategic importance as a state in using these IPOs to build a stronger, more resilient country brand, on a par with other states that have demonstrated the power of a single, coherent story to communicate a country's financial strength.
The MSCI classification is highly relevant in this regard. Moving from frontier to emerging is not a change of label. It is a change of investment universe. There are funds that, by mandate, cannot invest in frontier markets. The day a country moves to emerging, it enters the indices that those funds replicate and money flows in almost automatically.
But here's what many people don't understand: MSCI doesn't just evaluate liquidity and capitalisation; it also assesses accessibility for international investors and the quality and clarity of the available financial information.
A market with good fundamentals but poor financial communication will remain a frontier-labelled market longer than necessary.
That is why Oman needs a country equity story that connects its macroeconomic transformation with each individual investment opportunity and is distributed in a coordinated manner to global capital decision-makers, not as a by-product of each transaction, but as a deliberate country strategy.
The most common mistake is to confuse a country's equity story with nation branding. A country equity story does not talk about culture, gastronomy, or quality of life. It discusses risk-adjusted returns, liquidity, the regulatory framework, the investment pipeline and corporate governance. It is a financial tool, not a diplomatic tool.
In practice, a country equity story is distributed through very specific channels: roadshows, coordinated participation in investment conferences (not tourism conferences), joint capital markets days between issuers and a constant flow of research and financial communication aimed at the analysis teams of the funds that matter and the international financial media. The key must be to make sure there is a clear international audience — 200-300 fund managers should do, the ones that talk to each other, read the same reports and attend the same conferences.
Once the narrative enters that circuit, it spreads on its own and everything Oman has achieved in recent years (the IPOs, the recovery of investment grade status, the best market in the Gulf, the financial centre), which has barely generated international coverage can be spun in a way that builds a global reputation, which is, I like to say, the only thing that really matters in the markets.
Oman already has all the necessary elements to be portrayed as a financial centre, including an IPO pipeline, sovereign infrastructure, a credit rating, a financial centre designation and overall stock market performance.
What it lacks is the architecture to turn transactions into a unique equity story and a coordinated message that reaches fund managers in London, New York and Singapore, the international financial media and decision-makers.
The window is open for developing a stronger national narrative structure.
If the new transactions are in the pipeline, if they are executed like the previous ones — transaction by transaction, without a country narrative, Oman will have missed another round of opportunities to move out of frontier status and onto the radar of global institutional capital.
There is a need to bring together the stock exchange, the investment authority, the regulator and a group of issuers, agree on a single narrative and take it to investment conferences where capital allocation to emerging and frontier markets is decided.
Not after the next IPO. Before.