🛢️ An Economy Riding One Pipeline
Oil is the story: production began in 2003 in the Doba Basin, and crude still leaves the country almost entirely through the 1,070 km Chad-Cameroon pipeline to the port of Kribi. TotalEnergies, Chevron, China National Petroleum Corporation and the state's own Société des Hydrocarbures du Tchad (SHT) are the major operators — ExxonMobil was the fourth until the government nationalized its assets in 2023, a move still unsettling investor confidence and now tied up in international arbitration. Cotton, livestock and gum arabic round out exports, but none come close to oil's share of foreign earnings.
📝 Setting Up a Company
Chad's company law runs on OHADA — the Organisation pour l'Harmonisation en Afrique du Droit des Affaires — a uniform commercial code shared with 16 other African states, so the legal skeleton (an SARL, Chad's standard LLC, needs just one shareholder and one director of any nationality, minimum paid-in capital around $2,000) will look familiar to anyone who's incorporated elsewhere in the OHADA zone. The reality on the ground is slower: registration through the Centre de Formalités des Entreprises and the investment promotion agency ANIE typically takes three months or more, roughly double the Sub-Saharan African average, and there's no public online company registry — verification happens in person in N'Djamena. All filings are in French.
🏭 Beyond the Wellhead
Outside oil, agriculture still employs the large majority of the workforce — cotton (a new 18,200-tonne ginning plant opened in early 2025), livestock, and subsistence farming of sorghum, millet and peanuts. Brasseries du Tchad (Gala Beer) is one of the few consumer brands with real national reach. The government's "Chad Connection 2030" plan, launched in mid-2025, targets $30 billion in public and private investment aimed at growing GDP 60% — an ambitious number for an economy currently worth under $19 billion.
📈 No Exchange of Its Own
There's no Chadian stock exchange. Regional capital-raising runs through the CEMAC bloc's own bourse in Libreville, though liquidity is thin even by regional standards — in practice, financing here means bank debt, oil-revenue-backed arrangements, or direct foreign investment rather than public markets.
General information, not legal or investment advice. Chad was FATF grey-listed in 2023 and company verification requires in-country counsel — anyone seriously exploring this market should engage a local or regional law firm before committing capital.
