Kuwait has been one of the GCC’s leading countries in digital transformation and technological adaptation and is now adding to its portfolio logistics leadership. The country’s freight forwarding industry generated roughly USD 2.77 billion in value added in 2025, moving an estimated 3.75 billion tonne-kilometers of goods across land, sea and air. Container traffic through its ports reached about 703,880 TEU that same year, which is still small next to a giant like Jebel Ali, but the gap is closing faster than most people realize thanks to a handful of projects moving from paper to pavement.
The big one sits on Bubiyan Island, where Mubarak Al-Kabeer Port is going up in three phases under Kuwait’s Vision 2035 plan, often called New Kuwait at home. Phase one alone is backed by roughly USD 4.1 billion and led by China Communications Construction Company, and it’s built around a 1,200-metre container terminal with capacity for 2.7 million TEU a year. The next two phases bolt on 14 more berths, taking the whole site past 8.1 million TEU across 24 berths once finished, more than ten times what Kuwait currently handles. It’s also the anchor of the much bigger Silk City, or Madinat Al-Hareer, masterplan, and it ties into China’s Belt and Road push to make Kuwait the shortest sea route into Central Asia.
None of that replaces what’s already there. Shuwaikh and Shuaiba, Kuwait’s two working commercial ports, still handle most of the day-to-day cargo. Shuwaikh runs 21 berths, 3 of them for containers, and Shuaiba has 20 berths with 4 set aside for containers, both relying on equipment that’s starting to show its age next to what Mubarak Al-Kabeer promises. Between the two of them, they’re carrying an economy that still brings in most of its consumer and construction goods by sea rather than overland or by air.
The airport tells a similar story. Kuwait International Airport’s new Terminal 2, originally priced at around KWD 1.3 billion, or about USD 4.3 billion, is meant to take passenger capacity from roughly 10 million today up to 13 million in its first stage, then 25 million, then eventually 50 million a year as later phases land. Cargo volumes already jumped from 195,000 tonnes in 2016 to 241,600 tonnes the following year, and once T2’s extra freighter and belly-hold space kicks in, that number is expected to climb a lot further.
Away from the ports and runways, warehousing and last-mile delivery are quietly becoming the fastest-growing part of the whole picture. Kuwait’s bonded warehousing and free zone logistics market, worth about USD 1.2 billion in 2025, is on track to hit USD 1.9 billion by 2031 at a 9.25% CAGR. The courier side is smaller, around USD 210.6 million in 2025, but growing at 6.97% a year toward USD 337.6 million by 2032, pushed mostly by cross-border e-commerce. FMCG and foodservice distribution, worth USD 1.29 billion in 2024, is headed toward USD 1.97 billion by 2030 as cold-chain and last-mile operators scale up.
All of this is happening while Kuwait leans harder into diversifying away from oil. Non-oil GDP growth is expected to hit 3.3% in 2026, up from 2.3% the year before, even as the 2026-2027 state budget projects a deficit of 9.8 billion KWD, around USD 31.9 billion, with oil revenues budgeted at 12.8 billion KWD against non-oil revenues of 3.5 billion KWD, up 19.6% year on year. Capital spending in that budget comes in at 3.1 billion KWD, with a real chunk of it earmarked for the ports, roads and terminals tied to Vision 2035. For a country that has spent decades defined by what it pumps out of the ground, logistics is quickly becoming one of the clearest signs of how seriously it’s trying to change that, measured in berths, terminals and tonnes rather than talking points.
References
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