Yemen Company & Beneficial Ownership Directory

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Yemen

Yemen is undergoing one of the world’s deepest and most sustained economic collapses: real GDP declined 1.5% in 2025 and was projected to contract a further 0.5% in 2026, government revenues fell to just 5.6% of GDP in 2025, and real GDP per capita has fallen roughly 58% since 2015, one of the steepest sustained per-capita collapses of any country currently tracked (World Bank, “Pushing Against the Tide,” Yemen Economic Monitor, Spring 2026, May 21, 2026). Public debt has surged to over 100% of the internationally recognized government’s GDP, with arrears accumulating to most external creditors; the IMF resumed Article IV consultations with Yemen in 2025 after an 11-year hiatus, itself a telling fact about the weakness of the country’s statistical and institutional base. Yemen effectively operates two separate currency zones stemming from the 2016 Central Bank of Yemen split: in Aden and other government-controlled areas the rial traded at roughly 1,616-1,633 YER/USD as of December 2025-August 2026, having appreciated sharply, described by the World Bank as roughly 27% stronger than a year earlier; in Sanaa and other Houthi-controlled areas the old banknotes traded at roughly 535-540 YER/USD. This is a genuine, structural, ongoing divergence, not a data error, and content should never quote a single national exchange rate for Yemen. Nearly three-quarters of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line (World Bank, May 2026), a sharp deterioration from the pre-war 48.6% figure still circulating in some older sources; unemployment was projected at 17.5% for end-2025 (ILO-modeled), with youth unemployment at 32.6%.

Yemen’s oil sector has been in acute flux: after roughly three years of halted exports following the October 2022 terminal disruptions, during which Yemen became a net oil importer, the Presidential Leadership Council announced on July 20, 2026 a resumption of crude exports from the Masila (Hadramout) and al-Uqla (Shabwa) fields, with net exportable volumes estimated around 40,000 barrels per day. That announcement came exactly one week after Saudi Arabia struck the runway at Houthi-controlled Sana’a airport on July 13, 2026 to block an Iranian aircraft, prompting the Houthis to declare the 2022 UN-brokered truce over; by September 2026, the conflict had escalated to include Houthi capture of the strategic Red Sea islands of Mayun and Greater and Lesser Hanish near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a September 8, 2026 Houthi attack on Saudi oil facilities that caused fires and wounded 73 people, and Saudi retaliatory strikes on Houthi-held territory. Whether oil exports from the government-held Hadramout/Shabwa fields have continued through this renewed conflict is genuinely unclear from available reporting and should be verified directly before being relied upon. Remittances, at roughly 20% of GDP as of 2023, remain a critical, if aging-data, lifeline, and Yemen’s humanitarian funding position has deteriorated sharply: the UN Response Plan covered only about 28% of needs in 2025, down from 56.5% in 2024, even as more than 22 million people, over half the population, are estimated to require humanitarian assistance in 2026.

Yemen’s governance remains fundamentally divided between at least two competing authorities: the internationally recognized government based in Aden, and the Houthi/Ansar Allah authority controlling Sanaa and much of the north, plus autonomous forces such as the Southern Transitional Council. Over 1.2 million public-sector employees in Houthi-controlled areas, including nearly 240,000 teachers, have gone unpaid or under-paid since September 2016, receiving only sporadic partial payments; the internationally recognized government generally pays its own civil servants but with frequent delays. Neither side fields a unified military: the government commands roughly 50,000 regular troops across fragmented factions, while Houthi/Ansar Allah forces are separately estimated, with lower confidence, at 150,000-200,000 fighters. Yemen also carries one of the world’s most severe humanitarian health crises: it reports the highest cholera burden globally, 35% of the global total, alongside acute malnutrition affecting over 2.2 million children under five. This content presents Yemen’s political, security and economic situation factually and with explicit dates throughout, given how rapidly it continued to develop through the sources reviewed, and counterparties should independently verify current conditions before relying on any single figure here.