Every few decades, the global economy reorders itself and the countries that read the moment correctly emerge with positions they could not have secured at any price. The current reordering — driven by supply-chain risk, the energy transition and a renewed premium on reliability — is one such moment. The Sultanate of Oman has, for some time now, been preparing for it. The evidence is not in declarations but in arithmetic and the arithmetic deserves a closer look than it has so far received.
RESILIENCE AS AN OUTCOME, NOT A SLOGAN
Begin with the macroeconomic ledger. In 2020, Oman’s public debt stood at roughly 68% of GDP. By the start of 2026, that figure had fallen to about 35% — nearly halved in five years, without devaluation, without capital controls and while running budget surpluses for three consecutive years through 2024.
In late 2025, all three major rating agencies returned the Sultanate of Oman to investment grade. The IMF projects real GDP growth of 2.9% in 2025, accelerating to around 4% in 2026, with inflation through 2025 below 1% — among the lowest in the globally.
The structural shift behind those numbers is more striking still. In 2020, hydrocarbons accounted for roughly 65% of GDP. By 2024, the share had fallen to 30%. Manufacturing value-added rose from 2.4 billion rials in 2020 to 4.1 billion in 2024, growing a further 7.2% in 2025; the sector now employs 248,000 workers.
Non-oil exports more than doubled, from 3.4 to 6.885 billion rials, over the same period. Cumulative foreign direct investment rose from 14.2 billion rials in 2020 to 30.9 billion by Q3 2025, with manufacturing FDI alone growing 24.6% in a single year. This is not a country waiting for the next oil cycle. It is a country quietly rewiring its productive base — and financing much of that rewiring through current revenue rather than debt expansion.
GEOGRAPHY THAT HAS MOVED FROM BACKGROUND TO FOREGROUND
That structural transformation is now intersecting with a global trend that gives it strategic weight. Oman’s 3,165 kilometres of coastline — most of it lying outside the Strait of Hormuz, opening directly onto the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean — was, for decades, a quiet feature of the map.
The events of recent years have changed how supply-chain managers interpret that geography. War-risk insurance premiums for vessels transiting Hormuz have risen by approximately 60%. Disruptions in the Red Sea have forced major shipping lines to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, adding ten to fourteen days to Asia–Europe voyages. Suez throughput remains below pre-2024 levels. In every shipping boardroom across the world, the lesson is the same: a supply chain dependent on a single chokepoint is, by definition, an unhedged supply chain.
This is the context in which Al Duqm now reads differently. The Special Economic Zone covers an area three times the size of Singapore. Its deep-water port, with berths of 16 to 18 metres, accommodates the largest container vessels currently in service.
By mid-2027, the 303-kilometre, $3 billion Hafeet Rail will link Suhar to the broader Gulf rail network. In 2024, Oman’s ports handled over 104 million tonnes of cargo and approximately 4.2 million TEU.
Salalah was ranked second globally on the World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index — ahead of every European port. Duqm’s cargo handling grew 152% in a single year. These are not aspirational figures. They are operational ones and they describe a logistics platform designed for an era in which routing diversity has become an economic asset rather than merely a contingency measure.
THE ENERGY TRANSITION, IN MOLECULES
The same coastline now anchors something larger. Through Hydrom, Oman’s national orchestrator for green hydrogen, the Sultanate of Oman has allocated some 50,000 square kilometres for green hydrogen and ammonia development. The first auction round attracted approximately $30 billion in committed investment across five facilities, targeting one million tonnes of green hydrogen annually by 2030.
Marquee projects are contracted and proceeding: HyPort Duqm is on track to deliver some 330,000 tonnes of green ammonia a year in phase one; ACME’s Duqm facility is moving into construction with a 30-year offtake agreement; a 4.5-gigawatt renewable project in Salalah targets 178,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually.
Within five years, Oman’s Indian Ocean coastline will host one of the world’s largest concentrations of green-molecule production capacity. Industrial buyers in steel, chemicals, fertilisers and shipping — sectors that cannot readily electrify — need exactly this: certifiable, geographically diversified supply at scale. Long-term offtake agreements signed today will determine whose ports those molecules arrive at and whose industrial bases benefit.
A PLATFORM BUILT ON CREDIBILITY, NOT SUBSIDY
None of this would matter without the institutional architecture to support it and that architecture has been built deliberately. An Investment and Trade Court provides foreign investors with a stable legal forum. Nine integrated electronic platforms support trade and entrepreneurship. More than 700,000 automated licences have been issued since 2020. Foreign investors can hold 100% ownership in nearly all sectors.
Free zones at Duqm, Salalah and Sohar offer tax holidays, duty-free imports and predictable regulatory regimes. External validation has followed: Oman’s ranking on the Index of Economic Freedom moved from 76th in 2020 to 58th in 2025 and on the Global Innovation Index from 84th to 69th. These are the marks of an economy competing on quality of platform — governance, predictability and market access — rather than on subsidy alone.
THE HONEST BALANCE
Oil price volatility remains a real exposure; the diversification path is clear but not yet complete. Hydrogen projects at this scale have never been executed anywhere at commercial maturity and some will run later than current schedules suggest. Oman Vision 2040 and the 11th Five-Year Plan, launched in January 2026, target 4% annual growth through 2030 — an ambitious figure that will need consistent execution to deliver. None of these caveats invalidate the thesis. They define the work that continues.
Every credible external assessment — by the IMF, the World Bank and the rating agencies — concludes that the trajectory is positive, the reform momentum genuine and the resilience increasingly institutional rather than cyclical. For a region in which economic narratives have often outrun economic delivery, the sequencing of those words matters.
For most of the twentieth century, the Gulf was a place where global economic forces arrived: oil flowed out, capital flowed in, the terms were largely set elsewhere. What is happening now is different. Oman is becoming a place where parts of the next economy are being built — where green molecules are being priced, where post-disruption supply chains are being rerouted, where a diversification model financed substantially through current revenues is being demonstrated. The numbers are public. The infrastructure is real. The platform is open.
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