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UAE registers strong 4.7% GDP growth, 6% expansion in non-oil sector since Covid-19, says official
The country to strongly focus on financial services, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, says Minister of Investment
- PUBLISHED: Wed 26 Feb 2025, 3:08 PM
The UAE has achieved spectacular growth since Covid-19 as the GDP grew at an annual average rate of 4.7 per cent while the non-oil sector averaged at a pace of 6 per cent annually, said Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, UAE’s Minister of Economy.
While delivering a welcome speech at Investopia, he said the UAE has “consistently demonstrated that unproductivity can be transformed”.
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“We started five years ago, as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UAE government conducted a comprehensive set of policy and structural reforms that transformed our national economy. GDP has grown at an annual average rate of 4.7 per cent since then, and the non-oil sector has averaged a spectacular 6 per cent. The foreign direct investment volume surged to $30.7 billion in 2023 and $22.7 billion. The UAE is a magnet for FDI inflows and a dynamic hub,” he said.
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“Our mission is to direct forces to a driving sustainable development and building in the common landscape and forward-looking,” he added.
3 focus sectors
While speaking during a fireside chat at the Investopia 2025, Mohamed Hassan Alsuwaidi, UAE’s Minister of Investment and managing director and group CEO, ADQ, UAE, will strongly focus on tapping opportunities and attracting investment in three key sectors - financial services, pharmaceutical and manufacturing,
"There's definitely significant room to grow in the financial sector, whether it's asset management, insurance, banking, FinTech and so on. Financial services is a space that has a huge amount of growth and potential. We're heavily pushing for pharmaceuticals, biosciences and medical devices.
"The UAE has cut a significant path into innovation and is spending a lot of time on genome sequencing, organizing data around the single file of patients, and creating centres for research and development, as they will lead to more discoveries around drugs and specific to our world. Thirdly, the opportunity for manufacturing is a growing space. And I don't think we can underestimate that," Alsuwaidi said during the Investopia 2025 conference.
He pointed out that the unique situation of UAE is that each emirate competes and the country is proud of it. “You have each of the emirates with individual priorities and policies. All emirates are competing. Everyone wants to do real estate and tourism. We try to find a cohesive policy at a federal level,” he said during the fireside chat on the first day of the two-day conference.
The minister revealed that they are working on introducing further reforms in the company’s law to remove any bureaucratic element and make the UAE even more appealing to foreign investors.
He also stressed that the UAE is already one of the easiest countries to do business as establishing businesses is quite easy for investors.
