What Are IKTVA and ICV? The Gulf Local-Content Rules That Decide Who Wins Energy Tenders

What the two programmes actually are

IKTVA and ICV are local-content programmes. Their purpose is to make sure that when a national oil company or a government body spends money, as much of that money as possible stays inside the national economy, building local industry, local jobs and local capability rather than flowing straight back out to foreign suppliers. They do that by measuring each supplier’s local contribution as a score, and then using that score in how contracts are awarded.

IKTVA stands for In-Kingdom Total Value Add. It is Saudi Aramco’s programme, launched in 2015 as a cornerstone of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 diversification agenda. It applies across Aramco’s supply chain, an annual procurement budget that exceeds 30 billion dollars across materials, equipment, services and logistics.

ICV stands for In-Country Value. It is the United Arab Emirates programme. ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi national oil company, launched its ICV programme in 2018, and the model has since been adopted nationally: the UAE’s National In-Country Value Programme is run by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, MoIAT, and a single ICV certificate is now recognised across ADNOC and a widening group of federal and emirate-level bodies. So while “ICV” is often used as shorthand for the ADNOC programme, in 2026 it is really a national framework.

The two are close cousins by design, both born of Gulf diversification strategy, both built to redirect oil-and-gas procurement into the domestic economy, and both expressing the result as a single certified percentage. The differences are in the detail of how the percentage is built and how it is used, which is where suppliers win or lose.

Project 54Local-content rules decide which suppliers capture Gulf energy spend: IKTVA and ICV reward those who manufacture, invest and hire inside Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

How an IKTVA or ICV score is built

Both programmes express local content as a ratio, and the inputs are broadly the same. The numerator adds up the value a supplier creates inside the country: money spent buying goods and services from local suppliers, the cost of manufacturing or work performed locally, investment in local plant and equipment, and the salaries and training of national employees. That total is divided by the supplier’s revenue from the relevant business, and the result is a percentage. A company that does most of its work, buying, building and hiring inside the country scores highly; one that imports finished goods and books the margin abroad scores low.

The scores are not self-declared. They are calculated from audited financial data and certified by approved third parties. Under the UAE national programme a supplier’s ICV certificate is issued by a MoIAT-authorised certifying body that reviews the submitted figures and applies the official national formula; Aramco runs an equivalent certification process for IKTVA. The certificate is time-bound, normally tied to the company’s audited financial year, so a supplier has to re-certify to keep a current score.

The treatment of people is where the design shows its teeth. The UAE formula weights the salaries and training of Emirati nationals more heavily than those of expatriate staff, and the bonus structure rewards year-on-year growth in Emirati headcount, so a business that runs entirely on an expatriate workforce hits a structural ceiling on its score. Aramco’s programme similarly rewards the employment and development of Saudis. Local content, in other words, is not only about where goods are made; it is also about who is employed and trained to make them.

IKTVA and ICV compared

The programmes rhyme, but they are not identical, and a supplier selling into both Saudi Arabia and the UAE has to manage two separate certifications, two formulas and two sets of priorities. The table below sets out the practical differences that matter when you are deciding where to manufacture, who to hire and how to structure a bid.

The single most important point for an international supplier is that neither score travels. An IKTVA score earned with Aramco does not help a bid in Abu Dhabi, and an ADNOC ICV certificate does not count in Dhahran. Each market has to be earned on its own terms, which is why Gulf market entry is a multi-year commitment rather than a single tender.

Why the score decides who wins the work

A local-content certificate is not a compliance formality that you file and forget; it is a number that sits inside the bid evaluation and changes the outcome. In ADNOC and Aramco tenders the local-content score is applied as a weighting at the commercial-evaluation stage, so a bidder with a higher score can win against a cheaper rival, and a supplier with a strong score and a credible localisation trajectory is rewarded over one that simply imports. Across the wider Gulf, participating entities use the score in three ways: as a percentage weighting on the total bid, as a tie-breaker between otherwise comparable bids, and as an eligibility threshold a bidder must clear to be considered at all.

That makes the score a commercial asset to be managed, not a box to be ticked. The suppliers that win treat their IKTVA or ICV plan the way they treat price and delivery: they map where their score is leaking, local versus imported content, expatriate versus national payroll, and they invest to close the gap before the tender, not after. Aramco’s flagship IKTVA Forum, the 2025 edition signed 145 agreements and memoranda worth about 9 billion dollars on its opening day, exists precisely to broker that localisation, matching international suppliers with Saudi partners and manufacturing opportunities.

For an international supplier the implication is strategic. Winning sustained Gulf energy spend means building a local footprint: manufacturing or assembling in-country, buying from local suppliers, forming joint ventures with national partners, and hiring and training Saudis or Emiratis. Each of those moves lifts the score, and the score is what converts a competitive product into a winning bid. This is the procurement reality behind the headline market numbers, and it is inseparable from the broader localisation pressure shaping how Gulf majors buy.

It also sits alongside the other supplier-qualification gates that now decide Gulf and global energy tenders, from carbon-data disclosure to procurement-ready documentation. Local content is the most consequential of them in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but it is rarely the only one a serious supplier has to clear.