Oman / Salalah appears to be expanding very quickly and would be a great country to do more business with. However we would be competitive with countries much closer and be prepared to lower prices using subsidies such as India and Turkey. Price is king and quality is a complex juggling act. Barley for human consumption needs to be white. That's it. All labs in flour mills we've seen use the same equipment and processing that we use at CBH.
Salalah flour mills have 450,000mt a year throughput with wheat sourced from India and Turkey. They are producing 1500tonne a day of flour and 13 tonne per day of pasta using very modern infrastructure.
The Salalah port authority focus on safety has meant that in the last 3 years the LTI rate has improved from 45 to 12. This year only 2 LTI's and they are proud of this achievement. The Salalah port has grown from 650 containers in 1998 to 4 million in 2011 making it the 29th largest in the world. A 20 year expansion plan will vastly increase the capacity, all of this in an area surrounded by Somalia and Yemen, quite a contrast.
Some interesting local facts are that there are lots of roads, lots of cars, lots of car dealerships, which is helped by fuel being 40c per litre.
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