What the UAE’s Strategic Expansion Means for Companies Entering the Gulf | By Lawrence Coward, Growth Team Leader - EOR at Auxilium

Date Posted:Wed, 24th Jun 2026

What the UAE’s Strategic Expansion Means for Companies Entering the Gulf | By Lawrence Coward, Growth Team Leader - EOR at Auxilium

This week the UAE confirmed an ambitious plan to expand its eastern ports at Dibba, Fujairah and Khorfakkan, lay new pipelines, rail and road links, and build at least one new harbour on the Gulf of Oman, with the explicit goal of cutting its dependence on the Strait of Hormuz to zero. As the Foreign Trade Minister put it, that's the direction "regardless of whether it's open or not."

 

That matters more than it first appears. Roughly 20% of the world's oil and gas moves through the Strait of Hormuz, it's the single biggest logistics risk anyone weighs when they look at this region. And the UAE's answer isn't a press statement; it's billions in infrastructure designed to route around it. Even before this expansion, the UAE was exporting around 1.7 million barrels a day through the Fujairah terminal on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing the strait entirely.

Two months ago, the UAE ended 59 years of OPEC membership, effective 1 May 2026, to pursue its own national interest. The scale of what that unlocks is striking at the point of exit, ADNOC's maximum sustainable capacity stood at 4.85 million barrels per day against an OPEC quota of just under 3.5 million, leaving at least 1.35 million barrels a day it simply wasn't allowed to bring to market. Free of the cap and backed by a $150 billion ADNOC investment programme and a target of 5 million bpd of capacity by 2027, that constraint is gone.

Put the two together and a clear pattern emerges. This is an economy systematically removing its own constraints, geographic, political and structural.

For any business weighing a move into the Gulf, that's the signal that matters most and the wider numbers back it up.

The market is already pulling in serious capital. FDI inflows reached $45.6 billion in 2024, up 48.7% on the $30.7 billion recorded in 2023, and on UNCTAD's figures the UAE ranked second in the world for FDI inflows. That momentum is carrying into new entrants specifically: in the first half of 2025 alone the country attracted 613 greenfield FDI projects worth $5.42 billion, companies building here from scratch. Underpinning all of it, GDP grew 6.2% to $517 billion in 2025, driven by the non-oil economy, with ratings agencies pointing to the country's ability to absorb shocks through a period that rattled the entire region.

In short, the UAE is methodically deleting the reasons a company might hesitate. Infrastructure, policy and capital get the economy moving. But what gets your people on the ground?

For most companies entering the UAE or any of the six GCC markets, the bottleneck was never the ports. It's the entity. Establishing a local company to legally employ staff takes months and real capital before you've earned a single dirham in return. Layer on WPS, Emiratisation, Saudi Nitaqat and six distinct compliance regimes, and the market-entry decision tends to stall at exactly the moment momentum matters most.

Our Employer of Record solution lets you hire, onboard and deploy a fully compliant team across the UAE and the wider GCC in days, no compliance risk carried by you. You can test a market, prove the model, and scale when the numbers justify it, with the legal and payroll burden sitting with us.

Author: Lawrence Coward, Growth Team Leader - EOR at Auxilium