author - oman observer

Ask a procurement manager on any large project in Duqm or Suhar a simple question: how many Omani suppliers could deliver a RO 2 million contract on time, to international standards, with audited...

Ask an old trader in Muttrah or Stone Town where the Indian Ocean begins and he will talk about the wind, not a map. For centuries the north-east monsoon carried Omani sailors to Mombasa, Zanzibar and...

Long before there were embassies, there were monsoons. For centuries the winds carried Omani dhows to Mombasa and Lamu with dates and fish, and brought them home with mangrove poles, spices and ivory....

Two ministries published numbers this year that belong in the same sentence. MoTCIT reports that the communications and information technology sector attracted around RO 1.2 billion of investment in...

An Omani manufacturer weighing a second production line this year faces an arithmetic problem. The Eleventh Five-Year Development Plan (2026–2030) asks the private sector to create 50,000 jobs a...

The writer is founder and CEO, Smart Investment Gateway, economist, board adviser & business transformation mentor For 30 years supply chains were organized around one question: who is cheapest?...

Every country, large or small, is in survival mode today. I say this not as rhetoric but as an observation from the data on my desk. The International Monetary Fund’s April 2026 World Economic...

The world is witnessing a profound reshaping of trade, energy and supply chains. Maritime routes are no longer merely passages for ships and goods; they have become integral to global economic...

Every generation inherits an anxiety about work. Ours has two: machines that learn faster than we do, and a planet that warms faster than we act. Yet buried inside this double worry is the most...

Half a century ago, Oman struck oil and bought itself a future. Today a second discovery is under way not beneath the desert, but inside our institutions, our enterprises and our people. Artificial...

The Horn of Africa is almost always introduced to the world through the vocabulary of crisis: conflict, drought, piracy, fragile states. The framing is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete....

Some visits mark a date on the calendar; others open a chapter in a nation’s economic story. The state visit of His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik to France on June 29 belongs firmly to the second...

The diplomatic milestone has rightly been celebrated. The GCC–UK Free Trade Agreement — the first comprehensive pact between the Gulf Cooperation Council and a G7 economy — was concluded this...

Every few weeks I sit across from a manufacturer in Suhar, Rusayl or Al Duqm who treats In-Country Value (ICV) the way one treats a tax audit — as a cost to be minimised, a box to be ticked, a...

A major, yet unheralded, logistics deal in June 2026 has successfully bridged the gap between the Central Asian steppe and the Arabian Sea. By acquiring a controlling stake in Uzbekistan’s Universal...

Every so often two countries look across a map and recognise in each other not a rival but a missing half. When Oman and Kazakhstan signed a framework agreement in Astana this spring to establish a...

On June 1, 2026, the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between India and Oman enters into force. Signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s December visit to Muscat and since...

On April 30, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik signed Royal Decree 50/2026, establishing a Special Economic Zone for artificial intelligence in the governorate of Muscat. The decree itself is...

On May 12, in a glass-and-steel building overlooking Mina Al Fahal, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik unveiled a plaque. The building is Bait Al Haitham — the "House of Haitham" — and it is far...

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...