In-Country Value: How Your Technology Spending Affects Your ICV Score and Your Tenders
If you bid for government work in Oman, part of your score is not about your proposal. It is about where your money goes afterwards.
In-Country Value is the share of your spending that stays in the Omani economy — local employment, local suppliers, local capability. It has been part of Omani procurement since the ICV Blueprint Strategy in the oil and gas sector, and it has since spread across government contracting generally. In June 2025 the Secretariat General of the Tender Board was renamed the Projects, Tenders and Local Content Authority under Royal Decree 57/2025, which tells you how the direction of travel is going.
Most businesses treat ICV as a procurement department problem. It is not. It is a decision about who you buy from, and technology is one of the largest discretionary purchases most mid-sized companies make.
The part almost nobody writes about: ICT has its own framework
For technology specifically, the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology publishes an ICT Sector Local Content Stimulation Framework governing local content in government tenders for telecommunications and information technology.
It does something unusually concrete. It sets the weight of the local content criterion in tender evaluation, scaled by the size of the tender:
| Tender budget (OMR) | Weight of the local content criterion |
|---|---|
| 1 – 25,000 | 10% |
| 25,001 – 50,000 | 20% |
| 50,001 – 250,000 | 25% |
| 250,001 – 3,000,000 | 30% |
| Above 3,000,000 | 30% |
Read that table again with a bid in mind. On a government IT tender worth more than a quarter of a million riyals, up to 30% of your evaluation score is decided by local content — not by your technical solution, not by your price, and not by anything you can improve in the week before submission.
The same framework sets a project-level Omanisation expectation of 40% for tenders above OMR 25,000 — that is at the project level, over and above your company’s general compliance — and requires large, GCC and international companies to subcontract a portion of the work to Omani SMEs, rising with the tier: at least 10%, 15%, 20% and 30% respectively as the budget bands increase.
The framework names three categories it exists to favour: freelancers, local technology startups, and micro, small and medium technology companies. Larger local, GCC and international companies may compete, but carry heavier local content obligations to do so.
There is also a mandatory list of ICT goods and a list of Omanised job categories referenced by the framework. At the time of writing the goods list is described as being prepared, so treat its contents as a live question rather than a settled one, and check before you assume an item is or is not on it.
The weights above are published by MTCIT and reproduced identically on its Arabic and English pages, but their application to a specific tender is governed by that tender’s documents. Never plan a bid from a general framework alone.
Where technology spending lands on the scorecard
Whether you are the bidder or the buyer, the same four questions determine the ICV consequence of a technology purchase:
1. Who invoices you, and where are they registered? A licence bought from a foreign vendor’s international entity is spend leaving the country. The same product bought through a locally registered partner is not — assuming the local entity is genuinely performing the work rather than passing it through, which is a distinction any competent audit is designed to catch.
2. Who does the work, and where do they sit? Implementation, configuration, integration, training and support are usually the larger half of a software project. That labour is in-country value if it is performed by people employed in Oman.
3. Is any of it subcontracted to an Omani SME? For the tiers above, this is not optional for larger bidders. For everyone else it is still points.
4. Who operates it afterwards? Multi-year support and hosting contracts are recurring spend, and recurring spend is where the cumulative numbers are decided. A five-year support agreement with a foreign provider is a five-year decision.
Notice that none of these questions is about the software. Two vendors can sell you the identical product with completely different ICV outcomes, purely on the basis of contracting structure and who performs the labour.
Local software versus foreign licences: the honest version
The tempting conclusion is “buy local, always.” That is not what the frameworks say and it is not good advice.
International platforms exist because they are, for many problems, the correct answer — a mature ERP, a global cloud platform, a specialist engineering package. Rebuilding one locally to score better on a tender is a bad trade, and buyers can tell.
The realistic position for most mid-sized Omani businesses is a blend, structured deliberately:
- The licence may well be foreign. Some of these products have no local equivalent, and pretending otherwise costs you capability.
- The implementation does not have to be. This is usually the larger spend, and it is the part that most naturally stays in-country.
- The custom layer — the integrations, the workflows specific to your business, the reporting nobody else needs — is very often the part best built locally, and it is where local knowledge of Omani tax, labour and language requirements is genuinely an advantage rather than a slogan.
- The support arrangement is a recurring, multi-year commitment and deserves to be decided with that in mind.
The point is not to maximise a score. It is that these choices were being made anyway, usually by default, and the default rarely favours you. Our note on what custom software really costs breaks down where the money in a software project actually goes — and the answer, consistently, is that licence cost is the smaller part.
What you need to keep so an audit passes
ICV claims are verified. The failure mode is not usually dishonesty; it is a company that genuinely did spend locally and cannot prove it eighteen months later.
Keep, per contract:
- Supplier invoices showing the invoicing entity and its commercial registration. A purchase order to a global brand name proves nothing about which entity was paid.
- Evidence of where the work was performed, and by whom, for services. Timesheets, named resources, or the delivery documentation that already exists.
- Subcontracts with Omani SMEs, with the SME’s valid registration and Riyada card at the time of the contract — not at the time of the audit.
- The Omanisation position on the project, distinct from the company-wide figure.
- Payroll and social insurance evidence for locally employed staff attributed to the contract.
The practical instruction: capture this at the moment of purchase, not at the moment of reporting. In systems terms this usually means one or two extra fields on the supplier record and the purchase order — country of the invoicing entity, SME status, ICV category — so the report is a query rather than a project. Retrofitting those fields across two years of transactions is a real cost, and it is entirely avoidable by adding them before the transactions happen.
This is the same principle that governs how systems should be integrated: decide which system owns a fact, and capture it once, at the source.
Registration: where you actually have to be listed
Registration is separate from scoring, and which registers apply depends on who you sell to:
Government tenders. The Esnad electronic tendering platform, operated by the Projects, Tenders and Local Content Authority, is where government tenders are published and where suppliers register. Registration categories distinguish local companies, international companies, SMEs and freelancers, and there are tender categories dedicated to SMEs. Your commercial registration details must be current with the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion before you register.
Oil and gas. The Joint Supplier Registration System (JSRS), an ICV initiative of the Ministry of Energy and Minerals with the operating companies, is the register for that sector’s supply chain.
SME status. A valid registration with the SME Development Authority and a current Riyada card are what make a company count as an SME for procurement purposes. If you intend to be subcontracted under someone else’s ICV plan, this is the document that matters, and it has to be valid at the right moment.
Check each register’s current requirements directly. Registration systems in this area have been reorganised more than once — the authority overseeing government tendering was itself renamed in 2025 — and a guide is never a substitute for the register’s own page.
The SME requirement, from both sides
Government contracts commonly require that a defined share of the contract value flows to Omani SMEs, and in the ICT framework above that share is explicit and rises with the size of the tender.
If you are the large bidder, this is a sourcing problem you should solve before the bid, not after the award. Finding a capable SME subcontractor with valid registration, under time pressure, after you have already committed to a percentage, is how companies end up with a subcontractor chosen for their paperwork rather than their work.
If you are the SME, this is the most underused route into large contracts in the country. The large bidders have an obligation to place work with you. Being registered, being findable, and being able to evidence your status is most of it. The reason this route is underused is mundane: many capable small technology firms have never registered anywhere a prime contractor would look.
Where this leaves your systems decisions
Three practical consequences:
Ask about contracting structure during vendor selection, not after. “Which entity will invoice us, and where is the work performed?” is a question with a different answer for most vendors than “what does it cost”, and it is a question they can only answer honestly before the contract is drafted. It belongs in the same conversation as everything in how to choose a software partner.
Add the fields before you need the report. Country of invoicing entity and SME status on the supplier record. Two columns, added once.
Treat multi-year support as the ICV decision it is. It is the largest recurring technology spend most companies have, and it is usually decided as an afterthought to the implementation.
Frequently asked questions
Does ICV apply to private-sector contracts, or only government ones? The obligations are strongest in government tenders and in the sectors that pioneered ICV. But large private contractors who bid for government or oil and gas work pass those requirements down their own supply chains, which means the requirement reaches companies who never bid for a public tender directly.
Is a low-value software purchase affected? Under the ICT framework, the local content criterion carries weight from the smallest tier upward — 10% of the evaluation weight even in the OMR 1–25,000 band. The absolute amounts are small; the habit of buying without asking is what scales badly.
Can a foreign vendor score well on ICV? A foreign vendor operating through a locally registered entity, employing people in Oman, and subcontracting to Omani SMEs contributes in-country value. What does not contribute is a pass-through arrangement where a local entity invoices and a foreign team performs everything. Audits are designed to find exactly that.
How is the local content score actually calculated? It is tender-specific. The framework sets the weight of the criterion; the tender documents set how it is scored. This article deliberately publishes no worked example, because a worked example from a general framework would mislead you about a specific bid. Read the tender.
We are a small technology company. What is the single highest-value action? Register — with the SME Development Authority for a valid Riyada card, and on Esnad in the correct category. You cannot be selected as a subcontractor by a company that is required to find one if you are not in the place they are required to look.
This article summarises published frameworks as at 21 August 2026 and is not legal, tax or procurement advice. Requirements are tender-specific and change; confirm your position with the relevant authority or a qualified adviser.
Sources: MTCIT — ICT Sector Local Content Stimulation Programme · MTCIT — إطار تحفيز المحتوى المحلي (Arabic) · Esnad — Oman Tender Board e-tendering · Royal Decree 57/2025
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