The Gulf States' Mineral Investment Push: Why UAE and Saudi Arabia Are Looking at Pakistan

Three years ago nobody from Abu Dhabi was calling me. Now I get two or three enquiries a month, and last September I had a delegation from a Riyadh-based fund sitting in my office in Islamabad asking very specific questions about antimony grades and rail access to Karachi port.

Something shifted. And it wasn't gradual.

The headline event most people point to is the $2 billion International Resources Holding (IRH) deal for a 50% stake in Reko Diq in December 2024 — the Abu Dhabi vehicle taking a slice of what Barrick and the Government of Pakistan control. But Reko Diq is Balochistan copper-gold, and it's the visible tip. What's happening underneath is a much broader Gulf repositioning, and it reaches all the way up to Gilgit-Baltistan where we operate.

Why the Gulf is buying rocks, not just barrels

Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 has a mining chapter that most Western commentators ignore. Ma'aden is being pushed hard, Manara Minerals (the joint venture between Ma'aden and PIF) was set up in 2023 specifically to acquire mining assets abroad, and the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh each January has quietly become one of the more serious deal-making rooms in the sector. The Saudis have publicly said they want to build a $170 billion mining industry by 2030.

The UAE moved differently. Less state-mining-champion, more sovereign-fund-plus-private-holding. IRH (part of the IHC group tied to Sheikh Tahnoon) has done deals across Africa — Zambia, Angola, Tanzania — and Pakistan is the natural extension eastward. It's the same playbook: minority to control stakes in copper, cobalt, and now our end of the periodic table.

Here's the thing. Both countries are sitting on hydrocarbon revenues they need to redeploy before oil demand curves start bending in the 2030s. Minerals are the obvious hedge because the same customers — China, India, Europe — that buy their crude also need copper for grids, antimony for flame retardants and munitions, molybdenum for pipeline steel, and tungsten for tooling. It's a currency swap dressed as industrial policy.

Why Pakistan, and why now

A few reasons, and they're not the ones you read in press releases.

First — geography. A container leaving Karachi hits Jebel Ali in under a week. Compare that to shipping concentrate from Zambia or the DRC to a Gulf smelter. For a UAE investor thinking about downstream processing at home, Pakistan is basically their nearshore. That's a logistics argument nobody in Washington makes, but it's the one that closes deals in Abu Dhabi.

Second — the political access. The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) was set up in 2023 with the military in the room, and for better or worse, it means a Gulf sovereign can sit across from Pakistani decision-makers who can actually deliver. Western majors find this uncomfortable. Gulf investors find it familiar. Deals that took eight years in the past are now moving in eighteen months.

Third — and this one people miss — the Gulf is comfortable with Pakistan in a way Western capital isn't. There's a two-million-strong Pakistani workforce in the GCC. Bank of counterparties who've done business together for forty years. When an Emirati fund sends a technical team to Skardu, they're not shocked by the logistics. They've flown into worse.

Fourth, honestly, is that Western majors largely pulled back from frontier jurisdictions after 2015. That left a vacuum. The Chinese filled some of it. The Gulf is filling the rest.

What Gulf buyers actually ask about

I've now sat through enough of these meetings to notice patterns. Gulf technical teams — particularly the Saudi ones, who've hired heavily from Rio, BHP and Ma'aden's own bench — ask sharper questions than most Western funds. They want:

• JORC or NI 43-101 compliant resource statements, or a credible path to one. No handwaving on grade.
• Off-take structure before equity structure. They want to know where the concentrate goes before they discuss the cap table. Often the answer they want to hear is "a Gulf smelter," which is why Ma'aden's downstream build matters.
• Water and power at site. In our case, Gilgit-Baltistan has hydro potential most people don't realise — glacial-melt rivers running year-round. This is a genuine advantage over Balochistan.
• Security and community. Not in a hand-wringing way. In a "who do we pay, who do we hire, and what's our liability envelope" way.
• Repatriation mechanics. This is where SIFC-era assurances get tested. The dollar outflow rules have loosened, but every serious investor still models a stress case.

On our own concessions I've had three separate Gulf-linked enquiries in the last twelve months — two on antimony (unsurprising given the Chinese export controls that kicked in through 2024) and one on the copper-molybdenum porphyry indications in the Karakoram belt. None have closed yet. But the tempo of enquiry is completely different from what it was in 2022.

What this means if you're a Western buyer reading this

You're now competing with capital that moves faster than you, has fewer ESG committee gates, and is willing to take construction risk you won't touch. That's the uncomfortable part.

The workable part is that Gulf investors are, in most cases, financial and strategic partners rather than end-users of the metal itself. Ma'aden wants to smelt. IRH wants returns. Neither of them is a German automaker who needs 4,000 tonnes of antimony trioxide a year on a ten-year contract. That off-take slot is still open. The question is whether Western buyers walk through it before a Chinese trader signs it in Dubai over a weekend.

And I'll tell you what I got wrong. Two years ago I assumed the serious money on our concessions would come from London or Toronto. I spent a lot of time on decks aimed at that audience. The actual cheques on the table today, or close to it, are being written in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. If you're reading this from Frankfurt or Detroit — what does your Pakistan strategy actually look like?