Karwon Composites supplies carbon fibre into the UAE with origin specified per order rather than assumed.
Almost everything written about carbon fibre in the Gulf is either a global market report with a regional paragraph bolted on, or a supplier's marketing. Very little of it uses the trade data, which is public, specific, and says some genuinely surprising things.
We pulled the UAE import figures by HS code to answer questions we needed answered ourselves. The picture that came back changed how we think about this market, and it is worth publishing.
Where the numbers come from
Carbon fibre moves under three headings in the harmonised system:
- 681511, carbon fibre tow and roving, the raw fibre
- 681512, fabrics of carbon fibre, woven and non crimp reinforcement
- 681513, other articles of carbon fibre, which captures rod, tube, plate and finished components
Figures below come from UN Comtrade with the UAE as the reporting country. Two limitations worth stating plainly. The UAE's most recent submission at this level of detail covers 2023, so the newest complete picture is two years old at the time of writing. And the three digit split was only introduced in 2022, so anything earlier sits in a combined code and is not comparable.
We are publishing the limitations alongside the numbers because most market summaries do not, and the gaps change how much weight the figures carry.
The market roughly doubled in a year
Total UAE carbon fibre imports across the three codes moved from about 9.17 million US dollars in 2022 to about 18.80 million in 2023. By weight, from roughly 189 tonnes to 283 tonnes.
Value nearly doubled while volume rose about half. That gap matters: the mix shifted toward higher value material, not just more of the same.
For scale, 283 tonnes a year is not a large market by global standards. It is a market a single well specified production line could serve, which is a fact with real strategic consequences for anyone thinking about local manufacturing.
The growth is in finished articles, not raw material
The most interesting movement is inside the split. Code 681513, finished articles, nearly tripled to about 9.70 million dollars and became the largest single category.
Read that again in plain terms. The UAE is increasingly importing finished carbon parts rather than importing fibre or fabric and converting it here.
That is the structural gap in this market. Rod, tube and plate arrive as completed goods from mills elsewhere. There is essentially no local conversion of reinforcement into stock shapes at any meaningful scale, so every additional tonne of demand is met by another container.
Anyone in this region who has waited months for a shipment of tube has felt that gap without necessarily seeing it in the data.
Most UAE carbon does not come from China
This is the finding that surprises people most, because the assumption runs the other way.
On UAE reported figures, China accounted for roughly 1.5 percent of carbon fibre tow by value and around 4 percent of finished articles. The dominant origins by value are European and American: the UK, Italy, the United States and Germany lead.
Two possible readings, and both are probably partly true.
The honest reading. UAE buyers in aerospace, defence and high specification industrial work have deliberately specified non-Chinese material. In defence adjacent supply chains this is often a hard requirement rather than a preference, and it is written into procurement documents.
The messier reading. Chinese export statistics show substantially more carbon fibre leaving China for this region than the UAE's import statistics show arriving from China. Some of that difference is third country routing, where material is shipped via another jurisdiction and declared with a different origin. Some is likely mis declaration. The gap is large enough to be worth knowing about if you are relying on a stated origin.
If origin matters to your programme, it needs to be evidenced at the consignment, not assumed from an invoice.
The price spread by origin is wide
Landed prices differ enormously by origin, and this is where the two readings above become a commercial question rather than an academic one.
For raw tow, European origin material landed in the range of roughly 46 to 67 US dollars per kilogram, against roughly 30 dollars for Chinese origin.
For finished articles, European origin landed in the range of about 70 to 122 dollars per kilogram, against roughly 50 dollars for Chinese.
So European origin carries something like a fifty to one hundred percent premium, depending on form. That is a real number and it is worth being clear eyed about what it buys. Sometimes it buys genuinely different fibre, particularly at intermediate and high modulus grades. Sometimes it buys a certificate of origin that a customer's procurement policy requires. Sometimes it buys nothing measurable at all.
The right question is not which is better. It is whether your end customer's specification, or their customer's, requires a particular origin. If it does, the premium is not optional and should be priced in from the start rather than discovered at submittal.
Fabric is growing faster than anything else
Separately from the annual figures, monthly data on carbon fabric imports puts the UAE somewhere between roughly 8.5 and 21.7 tonnes a month, growing at around 57 percent year on year.
That growth rate is the single most striking number in the whole exercise. It reflects the expansion of UAV manufacturing in the Emirates, marine and yacht building, and structural strengthening work in construction.
It also means anything written about this market more than two years ago is describing a market roughly a quarter the current size.
What this means if you are buying
Assume your material has travelled. With no meaningful local conversion, essentially everything is imported, and lead time is dominated by freight and clearance rather than by production. Building your programme schedule around the assumption that material is one phone call away is the most common planning error we see.
Ask where it is actually from, and how that is evidenced. Given the gap between Chinese export figures and UAE import figures, origin claimed on a commercial invoice is not the same as origin demonstrated. If your customer cares, get it documented.
Price the origin requirement in early. If a defence or aerospace customer requires non Chinese material, that is a fifty to one hundred percent input cost difference. It has to be in the estimate from day one, not absorbed later.
Do not assume the cheapest origin is available at your grade. The price spread narrows considerably at intermediate and high modulus grades, where fewer mills compete.
What we take from it
We built Karwon Composites around a straightforward reading of this data. The UAE consumes a growing volume of carbon, converts almost none of it locally, and pays a substantial premium for origin certainty. Supply into that gap has to be built on knowing exactly where material comes from and being able to say so.
Karwon Composites supplies carbon fibre rods, sheets, tubes, profiles, fabrics and prepreg into the UAE from Korean, European and Chinese mills, with origin specified per order rather than assumed.
Talk to us about a requirement
Notes on sources
Figures are from UN Comtrade, UAE as reporter, HS codes 681511, 681512 and 681513, for calendar years 2022 and 2023. Monthly fabric estimates are derived from mirror data reported by exporting countries. Landed price ranges are calculated from declared value divided by declared weight, which includes freight and insurance to the extent captured in the declaration and should be treated as indicative rather than as a quotable price.