Mining Holds 45 Percent of Qatar’s QR172 Billion Foreign Investment Stock

Last updated: August 13, 2026 8:28 pm

Qatar’s inward investment position keeps rising and keeps concentrating, with professional and technical services accounting for 2 percent of the total.

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Irina Duisimbekova- President and Co-Founder of Licorne Gulf Holding

Qatar’s stock of inward foreign direct investment reached QR172.2 billion, about $47.2 billion, at the end of March, up 3.3 percent on the previous quarter, according to the survey the National Planning Council published on 9 August with the Qatar Central Bank. Qatari investment abroad rose 3.5 percent over the same period to QR221.7 billion, leaving the country’s outward position roughly QR49 billion larger than its inward one.

The headline reads well. The composition is the story. Five activities account for more than 90 percent of the inward stock: mining and quarrying at 45.3 percent, financial and insurance activities at 31.9 percent, manufacturing at 13 percent, information and communication at 2.8 percent, and professional, scientific and technical activities at 2 percent.

Two figures in that list matter. The first is 45.3. The second is 2.

A target denominated in dollars

Qatar’s Third National Development Strategy targets $100 billion in foreign direct investment by 2030 and a place among the world’s ten leading business environments. The promotion machinery has been built to match: a $1 billion incentives programme launched in May 2025 covering up to 40 percent of eligible local investment costs over five years, and Invest Qatar representatives now posted in London, New York, Paris, Mumbai and Istanbul. The agency reported $3.4 billion of project capital expenditure across 373 projects in 2025, generating 15,051 jobs, with more than half of that spending going to greenfield ventures and close to half of all projects classified as medium to high technology.

Project capital expenditure and balance of payments stock are different measures and do not net against each other. But they point the same way. Qatar is winning a rising count of mid-sized, knowledge-intensive projects while the capital base stays anchored in hydrocarbons and finance.

The competition next door

Those projects are contested. Saudi Arabia recorded SR133 billion of FDI inflows in 2025 and has pulled more than 700 multinationals into relocating regional headquarters to Riyadh, supported by 30 years of zero corporate income tax on qualifying headquarters activity. On UNCTAD’s balance of payments measure, the UAE led GCC inflows in 2024 at $45.6 billion, with Saudi Arabia at $15.7 billion. For a company sequencing a Gulf entry, that gravity usually sets the order, and the market entered first tends to become the regional base by default.

Enter once

This is the gap Licorne Gulf Holding, the Doha-headquartered investment group led by founder and president Irina Duisimbekova, has organised itself around. Its published position is that dual entry beats sequential entry, using a mirrored 51/49 joint venture structure in both Qatar and Saudi Arabia. “The companies that win in the Gulf won’t be the ones that enter first,” Duisimbekova wrote on LinkedIn this month, adding the operational instruction underneath it: “Standardize the backbone early, or pay for the mess later.”

The firm’s own pipeline is built that way. It has signed joint ventures in Qatar with the cybersecurity firm Erium, the biotech company Nudra and the San Francisco accelerator Peachscore, and on 31 March it agreed a green channel with the ZGC-GCC Innovation Partners Program, a body launched by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, to route Chinese technology companies into Qatar. The group says it committed more than $600 million to the technology sector in 2025 through direct investment, joint ventures and post-listing services, a figure it has published itself and which is not independently verified.

What a builder cannot move

There is a limit worth stating plainly. A venture builder changes the number of companies operating in a market long before it changes the share of capital they represent. Qatar’s 45.3 percent mining weighting reflects North Field scale investment, and hydrocarbons will keep absorbing the largest tickets for the rest of the decade. Cybersecurity, biotech and applied AI ventures will not reprice a stock measured in tens of billions of dollars, and Qatar’s own target is set in dollars.

Which is why the 2 percent line is the one to watch. Professional, scientific and technical activity is where knowledge transfer actually registers on the national accounts, and it is the smallest of the five categories the National Planning Council reports. The council’s secretary general, Abdulaziz bin Nasser bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, has said the priority is accelerating investment growth in non-hydrocarbon sectors. That is a composition target, not a volume one, and composition is the harder thing to buy.

Source: https://financialarabia.com/mining-holds-45-percent-of-qatars-qr172-billion-foreign-investment-stock/