Chad Company & Beneficial Ownership Directory

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Chad

Chad’s eastern border with Sudan has become a live security flashpoint: after repeated cross-border incursions linked to Sudan’s civil war, including a February 2026 attack that killed five soldiers and three civilians at a Chadian army post, and a subsequent drone strike that killed at least 16 civilians in the border town of Mabrouka, President Mahamat Idriss Déby ordered the closure of the roughly 1,300 km border with Sudan, per reporting corroborated across Sudan Tribune, Radio Tamazuj and the Washington Times. Déby, who won a first-round presidential election in May 2024 with 61% of the vote, is now governing a country simultaneously hosting an estimated 1.3 million Sudanese refugees — the largest refugee movement into any single country in 2025.

The economy remains built around oil: crude production from the Doba fields, moved via the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline to a marine terminal off Cameroon, has run at roughly 126,000–144,000 barrels a day through 2024–25 depending on the source, with a government strategy targeting 250,000 b/d by 2030. Oil supplies somewhere between 41% and 52% of government revenue depending on the year and methodology cited, alongside the bulk of export earnings, while agriculture — dominated by rain-fed farming and a livestock sector that alone accounts for 18% of GDP — still employs the large majority of the rural population.

Formal business infrastructure is thin: new business registrations fell from 1,632 in 2023 to 1,391 in 2024, per World Bank entrepreneurship data, and only about 7% of adults are formally served by a bank. No reliable, independently verifiable data on enterprise size structure or foreign-ownership share of Chadian businesses was found — a genuine gap in the country’s statistical coverage rather than an oversight in this research, consistent with Chad ranking among the world’s most data-scarce economies.

As a landlocked country, Chad depends almost entirely on the Port of Douala in Cameroon, roughly 1,800 km away, for trade access — a corridor that UNCTAD identifies as carrying around 80% of all Central African transit traffic and where Chad’s own logistics costs rank among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. That dependency, combined with electricity access of just 13.4% nationally and basic sanitation access of only 13%, frames the practical operating constraints facing any business active in the country.