Omantel's Tech Pivot Pays Off: ICT Revenue Up 63.8% in H1 2026

Omantel released its first-half 2026 financial results this month, and buried inside a headline profit jump is a number that matters more for Oman's digital infrastructure story: revenue from ICT and emerging technologies grew 63.8% year-on-year. For a company still best known as the Sultanate's incumbent fixed and mobile operator, that is the clearest evidence yet that its bet on cloud, cybersecurity and national digital infrastructure is starting to generate real money, not just headlines.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Omantel Group's net profit rose 73.5% year-on-year to RO292.8 million (about $760 million) in H1 2026, according to results reported by Muscat Daily on August 11.
• Revenue from ICT and emerging technologies, the segment covering cloud, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure, grew 63.8% to add RO10.7 million, which Omantel attributed to its ongoing "TechCo" strategy, as Telecom Review Middle East reported.
• Domestic revenue climbed 11.2% to RO357.2 million, with wholesale (international carrier and subsea capacity) revenue up 17.3% and fixed broadband revenue up 8.3%, according to Muscat Daily's breakdown of the disclosure.
• Net profit attributable to shareholders rose 60.1% to RO58.6 million, though a large share of the group-level jump came from RO159 million in investment gains through Zain Ventures rather than domestic operations.
• The results build on Omantel's February 2026 launch of Otech, its unified technology arm combining Oman Data Park and Tadoom, a move the company framed as central to its shift from telco to "TechCo."

📊 What the Numbers Actually Show

The headline figure, a 73.5% jump in group net profit to RO292.8 million for the six months to June 2026, was driven mostly by financial engineering rather than network expansion. As Muscat Daily reported, the increase reflected stronger EBITDA performance alongside higher investment income from Zain Group, Omantel's Kuwaiti telecom affiliate, which contributed RO159 million in gains executed through Zain Ventures. Total group revenue, which consolidates Zain's much larger regional footprint, rose 5.7% to RO1.705 billion.

Strip away the Zain contribution and look only at Omantel's home market, and the more interesting story appears. Domestic revenue rose 11.2% to RO357.2 million, and within that, the segments grew unevenly:

In absolute terms, ICT and emerging technologies is still the smallest of the five domestic lines, adding roughly RO10.7 million in H1 2026. But it is by far the fastest-growing, and it is the segment that houses the cloud, cybersecurity, data-centre and enterprise-IT services Omantel has spent the past two years consolidating.

🖥️ Why the ICT Line Is the Real Story

Omantel folded its enterprise technology assets, including Oman Data Park and the Tadoom platform, into a single unit called Otech in February 2026, a move it described at the time as a step toward "digital sovereignty" for Oman, as covered in our earlier report on the Otech launch. The H1 2026 filing is the first full financial period since that restructuring, and the 63.8% growth in the ICT and emerging-technologies line is the first hard evidence that the consolidation is translating into commercial traction rather than just an organisational chart change.

When Omantel reported its full-year 2025 results in March, chief executive Aladdin Abdullah Baitfadhil pointed to the same underlying strategy, tying it explicitly to national infrastructure ambitions.

Chairman Mulham Al Jarf struck a similar note when the FY2025 numbers were disclosed, saying the results "reflect the success of our diversified portfolio, the resilience of our core business, and the disciplined execution of our strategic priorities," according to the same Zawya press release. The H1 2026 figures give that language something concrete to point to.

🌐 The Wholesale Angle: Cables, Not Just Cloud

The 17.3% jump in wholesale revenue is worth flagging on its own. Omantel operates several of Oman's international submarine cable landing stations, including facilities in Muscat, Salalah and Khasab, positioning the country as a connectivity node between Asia, Africa and Europe. Growth in wholesale revenue typically reflects rising demand from international carriers and hyperscale cloud providers leasing capacity through Oman rather than domestic retail activity, a trend that lines up with Oman's broader push to market itself as a regional data-centre and AI-infrastructure hub, an ambition explored in depth in our earlier coverage of cloud service providers operating in Oman.

📶 The Bigger Market Backdrop

Omantel's results landed alongside separate national telecom data published by the National Centre for Statistics and Information. According to figures reported by Muscat Daily on August 10, fibre-optic connections across Oman climbed 7.4% year-on-year to 364,487 by the end of June 2026, while satellite internet subscriptions, still a small base, surged 134.3%. Mobile subscriptions overall rose 1.3% to 8.324 million, with postpaid growing 6.2% even as prepaid declined 2.1%, a shift toward higher-value, longer-term connections that mirrors the direction Omantel's own results are pointing.

🔍 What's Still Missing

Omantel has not disclosed a specific capital expenditure figure tied to the ICT and emerging-technologies buildout for H1 2026, and the company's own commentary, as summarised in reporting on the disclosure, credits the segment's growth broadly to its "TechCo strategy and diversifying its income sources" without breaking out how much of the RO10.7 million increase came from new enterprise cloud contracts, cybersecurity services, or data-centre leasing specifically. Independent analysts have also noted that a large share of the group's headline profit growth is attributable to Zain Group's performance and one-off investment gains rather than Oman-based operations, meaning the domestic technology story, while real, is smaller in absolute terms than the 73.5% headline suggests.

🇴🇲 Why This Matters for Oman

Oman's Vision 2040 targets a much larger role for digital services in the national economy, and Omantel remains the single largest domestic player capable of building that capacity, from fibre and 5G to cloud and cybersecurity. A quarter where the fastest-growing revenue line is ICT and emerging technologies, not mobile or device sales, is a small but measurable sign that the country's digital infrastructure investment is starting to show up in a major operator's books rather than only in press-release language. For businesses and startups relying on Omantel's cloud, data-centre and connectivity services, sustained double-digit growth in this segment also signals that pricing, capacity and service quality in that space are likely to keep evolving quickly over the next few reporting periods.