For decades, moving freight across the Gulf meant one thing: trucks crossing hundreds of kilometers of desert highway between disconnected national markets. That era is ending, and the investment figures show exactly how fast. The GCC logistics market reached roughly 114.56 billion USD in 2025 and is projected to climb to 182.01 billion USD by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate of 5.01%. Separate estimates from Mordor Intelligence put the freight and logistics segment at 83.24 billion USD in 2025, rising to 120.21 billion USD by 2031 at a 6.12% CAGR, driven largely by sovereign investment in integrated port, air and rail corridors.
Road transport still carries the bulk of that freight, accounting for about 47.3% of the market by mode, with seaways at 28.4%, airways at 15.2% and railways at 9.1%. That last figure looks small today but it is where most of the new capital is going, because rail is the piece that finally lets ports, industrial zones and inland markets function as one connected system rather than a chain of separate handoffs.
The UAE’s Etihad Rail network is the clearest example of what that shift looks like in practice. Freight operations went live in 2023 across a 900 Kms line running from Ghuwaifat on the Saudi border to Fujairah on the east coast, and the full network is now being extended past 1,200 Kms at a cost north of 50 billion AED. In the early months of 2026 alone, the network moved 1.8 million tonnes of sulphur and more than 4 million tonnes of aggregates, on top of over 129,000 containers, while removing more than 340,000 truck journeys from UAE roads. Operators report freight costs falling by 30 to 40% on routes shifted from road to rail, with a single freight train replacing roughly 300 heavy trucks per journey. By 2030, Etihad Rail is targeting 60 million tonnes of freight a year, connected directly into Khalifa Port, Jebel Ali and the Industrial City of Abu Dhabi.
Saudi Arabia’s answer is the Landbridge, a project that has been on the drawing board in various forms since the mid 2000s and is now moving toward construction. The core line runs 950 Kms between Jeddah on the Red Sea and Riyadh, linking onward to the existing Riyadh-Dammam corridor and a further 115 Kms extension to Jubail. Estimated costs have ranged from 7 billion USD to 10.6 billion depending on scope, with the wider six-line program, including links to King Abdullah Port and Yanbu, valued at closer to 26.6 billion USD once fully built out. The logic is straightforward: cargo that currently takes about three days to sail around the Arabian Peninsula between Jeddah and Dammam could move port to port by rail in roughly ten hours once the line is operational, cutting reliance on the Strait of Hormuz for east-west trade.
Ports remain the anchor points these corridors are built around. Jebel Ali handled 15.5 million TEU in 2024, its highest volume since 2015 and an increase of roughly 1 million TEU over the previous year, out of a total annual capacity of 19.4 million TEU across four terminals and more than 100 berths. That single port accounted for close to 18% of DP World’s global container throughput of 88.3 million TEU for the year. Breakbulk cargo through Jebel Ali grew even faster, up 23% year on year to 5.4 million metric tonnes, reflecting the pace of regional infrastructure and industrial build-out rather than consumer trade alone.
Oman is pursuing a similar logic further south. Duqm Port and its surrounding special economic zone span more than 2,000 square Kms and are being positioned as a multimodal gateway linking Indian Ocean shipping lanes to Gulf markets, while a planned 303 Kms rail link between Sohar and Abu Dhabi, backed by an estimated 3 billion USD in investment, would tie Omani ports directly into the UAE network for the first time. Once complete, that link would create a continuous rail corridor across the northern Gulf, an idea the region has discussed since a GCC feasibility study first floated a unified six-state railway network back in 2004.
None of this infrastructure matters in isolation from the trade it is meant to carry. GCC economies are forecast to grow around 4.4 to 4.5% in 2026, with non-oil sectors, logistics chief among them, doing much of the work. Saudi Arabia alone has earmarked roughly 133.3 billion USD for multimodal corridor development tied to its National Transport and Logistics Strategy, alongside continued digitization of customs processes across the bloc. For freight forwarders and shippers operating in this environment, the practical shift is less about any single project and more about what happens when ports, rail lines and free zones start functioning as one network instead of six separate national systems. That is the corridor economy the GCC has been building toward, and the infrastructure numbers suggest it is now closer to arriving than it has been at any point in the past two decades.
References
Construction Business News Middle East. (2026, April 28). How the GCC is powering logistics growth through infrastructure. https://www.cbnme.com/news/how-the-gcc-is-powering-logistics-growth-through-infrastructure/
DP World. (2025, February 19). DP World records highest cargo volumes at Jebel Ali Port since 2015. https://www.dpworld.com/en/news/dp-world-records-highest-cargo-volumes-at-jebel-ali-port-since-2015
ENR. (n.d.). Saudi Arabia moves forward on $7B rail Landbridge project. https://www.enr.com/articles/63196-saudi-arabia-moves-forward-on-7b-rail-landbridge-project
IMARC Group. (2026, July 6). GCC logistics market size, share, growth & forecast 2034. https://www.imarcgroup.com/gcc-logistics-market
Logistics Middle East. (2026, January 5). GCC logistics and freight forwarding outlook for 2026. https://www.logisticsmiddleeast.com/logistics/gcc-logistics-and-freight-forwarding-outlook-for-2026
Mordor Intelligence. (2026, January 29). GCC courier, express, and parcel (CEP) market forecasts to 2031. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/gcc-courier-express-and-parcel-cep-market
Mordor Intelligence. (2026, March 11). GCC freight and logistics market size & growth to 2031. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/gcc-freight-and-logistics-market
Supply Chain Digital. (n.d.). How Etihad Rail is delivering on UAE’s supply chain ambition. https://supplychaindigital.com/news/etihad-rail-delivering-on-uae-supply-chain-ambition
WAM (Emirates News Agency). (2026, May 4). Etihad Rail transports 1.8 million tonnes of sulphur, prepares for phased passenger launch in 2026. https://www.wam.ae/en/article/c01kg9s-etihad-rail-transports-18-million-tonnes-sulphur
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Saudi Landbridge Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Landbridge_Project