Monday 16 / September / 2024
Muscat: The industrial cities affiliated with the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (Madayn) witnessed a remarkable growth in their digital indicators in terms of requests and investment volume of existing projects by the end of the first half of 2024.
Eng. Dawood bin Salem Al Haddabi, CEO of Madayn, confirmed that the number of investment applications submitted to Madayn increased by 30 percent during the first six months of 2024, reaching 184 applications, compared to 141 applications during the same period in 2023.
He said in a statement to Oman News Agency that the total volume of investments in all industrial cities affiliated with Madayn amounted to OMR7.6 billion, compared to approximately OMR7.4 billion by the end of 2023, with a growth rate of 2.3 percent and an amount of OMR177 million.
He added that the volume of added industrial investment amounted to about OMR151 million, while the volume of added non-industrial investments amounted to about OMR62 million.
He noted that Sohar Industrial City achieved the highest increase in the total volume of investments compared to other industrial cities, as the total volume of its investments increased during the same period of this year by OMR53 million.
Regarding the investment projects index in the industrial cities affiliated with Madayn, he said that the number of investment contracts until the end of the first half of 2024 amounted to 2,310, an increase of 0.65 percent compared to the end of 2023.
The investment fields of these contracts are distributed as follows: 70 percent are for industrial investments, 12.6 percent are for commercial investments, 7.3 percent are for service investments, 4.8 percent are for technical investments and 5.3 percent are in other fields.
Engineer Dawood Al-Hadabi said that the number of workers in local investments is about 55,000 workers by the end of 2024 first half, compared to about 50,000 workers until the end of 2022, an increase of 10 percent.
The percentage of Omanisation reached 38 percent and the workforce is concentrated in the industrial sector at 81 percent compared to other investment fields in industrial cities.
He further pointed out that the index of leased areas in industrial cities increased by 0.30 percent, as the total leased areas in localised investments until the end of the first half of 2024 amounted to 33.7 million square metres, compared to 33.6 million square metres with an occupancy rate of up to 35 percent of the total developed and undeveloped leasable areas of existing cities, explaining that the institution issued 297 permits for service providers and 889 activity licences.
