author - oman observer

Somewhere this week, in a boardroom in Seoul or Manchester or Riyadh, a company is deciding whether to build a factory at Suhar or a resort on the Dhofar coast. The spreadsheet is finished. The...

Five years ago the National Programme for Digital Economy set out to put government online, connect the country and prepare the ground. On October 22, as the Ministry of Transport, Communications and...

For as long as most of us have been in business, the pattern was familiar. A new fee, a new licence condition or a new quota would appear, and we would learn about it the same day as everyone else. We...

Long before airline timetables, the monsoon did the logistics. For centuries its winds carried dhows between Oman’s coast and the Horn of Africa, with frankincense and trade goods in the hold and...

Oman was building ships long before it exported a barrel of oil. The shipwrights of Sur turned out ocean-going baghlahs and ghanjahs for trade across the Indian Ocean. At its height, Oman's...

On September 21, Oman did something governments seldom do. It put a deadline on itself. Under the new Executive Regulation of the Special Economic Zones and Free Zones Law, issued by the Public...

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...