Muscat – Of the 160 companies Oman Investment Authority (OIA) oversees, only a handful are making losses. According to the president of OIA, the authority doesn’t want to hold on to loss-making enterprises and has a plan to exit 35 companies and investments over the next five years.

“Out of 160 companies, the loss-making companies can be counted on one hand, and we don’t think twice about liquidating any company that makes continuous losses,” H E Abdulsalam bin Mohammed al Murshidi, President of OIA, said in Oman TV’s ‘With Youth’ show on Tuesday evening.

He further added that “no amount of loss is acceptable to us, and I sense an improvement in the performance of OIA companies”.

Speaking to a select audience, H E Murshidi informed that before making any investment, the one key question that OIA asks itself is – what does such an investment mean to Oman? “For OIA, preserving money is more important than growing it, while community contribution is one of the main indicators for assessing a company’s performance, for which we launched the ICV programme called Qimam.”

About OIA investments, he informed that it has assets worth over RO16bn – 60 per cent investment in Oman and 40 per cent abroad. “Our foreign investments are geographically and sectorally distributed. A part of our investment plan is set for future technologies that we aim to attract to the sultanate.”

According to H E Murshidi, in the next few years there will be announcements of several projects in all governorates in various sectors to facilitate decentralisation of the economy.