India UAE Expansion Splits the Gulf Value Chain
The move
Indian companies are dividing industrial work across India, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Manufacturing stays in India or moves to Saudi Arabia, while the UAE handles regional customization, storage, logistics, and customer-facing work.
Mumbai-based Apar Industries, India’s largest transformer-oil manufacturer, built a 30k sqm plant in Sharjah’s Hamriyah Freezone for localized blending, storage, and delivery. The facility supports more than 100k tons in annual sales and a reported 70% share of the GCC transformer-oil market.
In June, Apar partnered with Saudi Aramco’s Luberef in Yanbu to secure upstream feedstock. The company kept regional customization and sales execution in its UAE subsidiary.
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What Apar Industries does
Apar Industries operates across multiple parts of the product’s regional journey. Its UAE operation handles blending, storage, customization, and GCC-wide distribution, while the Saudi partnership connects feedstock sourcing to Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure.
Why the UAE keeps winning the logistics-and-customization layer
“The UAE’s comparative advantage is about reducing the friction between production and the customer,” Samriddhi Vij, associate fellow for geopolitics at Observer Research Foundation Middle East, says.
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