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Tribune News Network
Doha
The industrial investments in the Gulf amount to $394.9 billion, according to the latest data on GCC industrial activities.
Extrapolating the data, Gulf Organisation for Industrial Consulting (GOIC) Secretary General Abdulaziz Bin Hamad al Ageel said there were 17,596 factories employing approximately 16.6 million workers in the region.
He was speaking at the Gulf Statistical Forum held in Riyadh under the theme"strengthening statistical partnerships to support economic policies and sustainable development in the GCC". The forum was organised by the General Authority for Statistics and the GCC Statistical Centre (GCC-Stat), along with international and regional stakeholders.
Breaking down the data further, Ageel said GOIC's IMI Plus data revealed that 3,125 factories operated in the manufacture of metal products (excluding machinery and equipment), followed by 2,978 in the manufacture of non-metallic mineral products and 2,025 in the manufacture of rubber and plastics products.
According to the data, the biggest share of cumulative investments went to the manufacture of chemicals and chemical products with investments worth $110.6 billion.
It was followed by manufacture of coke and refined petroleum products with $98.9 billion; basic metals with approximately $59 billion; other non-metallic mineral products with around $40 billion.
Highlighting the sector's contribution to jobs, Ageel said manufacture of other non-metallic mineral products employed the largest share of workers, 16.7 percent or 278,400 workers, followed by the manufacture of metal products with 255,700 workers, the manufacture of food products with 194,600 workers, and the manufacture of rubber and plastics with 137,400 workers.
In terms of the size of the factories, Ageel said there are 11,969 small, 2,701 medium and 2,926 big factories in the GCC, as of 2016. The largest share of big and medium factories went to Saudi Arabia with 1,774 big and 1,531 medium factories, while the UAE had the biggest share of small factories (5,433), followed by Oman with 1,284 factories.
In this regard, GOIC takes into account the unified invested capital as a criterion to distinguish between types of Gulf industries, after carrying out a thorough review of the components of GCC manufacturing industries.
Consequently, small industries have less than two million USD invested in each of them, medium industries have a capital of two to six million USD each, while big industries receive six millions and more worth of investments.
