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The trouble, for many university <a href="https://menainsights.com/hamdan-foundation-students-participate-in-international-academic-programme-at-the-university-of-cambridge/”>students in Oman, rarely starts with the ideas. It often starts from mid-sentence. Switch from Arabic to English inside the same document, and the formatting comes apart — margins drift, text runs the wrong direction. It’s a micro problem, but a constant one, and that’s why a number of Omani students choose to download WPS Office.
On July 28, a delegation of faculty and students from Oman’s University of Technology and Applied Sciences, known as UTAS, visited Kingsoft Office’s headquarters in Zhuhai. For some, it was their first trip to China. For others, it was something closer to a homecoming: they had used WPS Office for years and finally got to see the company behind it.
Arabic-language support and right-to-left formatting are what firstly draw some students to WPS Office. What keeps them there, several said, is more basic — whether the tool helps them get an assignment done before deadline.
“WPS Office lets me draft something faster, then finish polishing it in a few clicks. It’s far more efficient than general AI tools,” said Nasser Almandhari, a UTAS student, citing the app’s translation feature in particular. “It gives me exactly what I want, and I don’t have to constantly switch between apps to get there.”
“It’s surprising enough that a Chinese company built an Arabic version of office software,” he said. “What got me is that it isn’t stuck at the concept stage. You can actually use it.”
What changed Nizar Alshukali’s mind wasn’t any single feature, but how the pieces worked together: real-time collaboration, several people editing one document at once, content syncing cleanly between his phone and his laptop — the exact moments that used to derail his group projects. “The answers are more accurate and better organized than what you’d get from other tools. It works from context, not just the words on the page,” he said. “It felt like it actually understood me.”
The visit gave Kingsoft Office and UTAS a chance to talk about what comes next. Both sides discussed co-developing the Arabic version of the office software, AI-focused internships and joint senior-thesis projects, part of a broader effort to bring more Omani students into the company’s AI programs and internships in China.
“AI is moving so fast that we need more partners in this space,” Dr
Al-Zadjali said. “In Oman, students and faculty want AI office tools that fit what they already use, that are easy to pick up and affordable, so AI actually delivers in daily teaching and work. That’s worth exploring together.”
The interest extends past campus. Hussain Alhammadi, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to China, has cited Kingsoft Office as a leading example of where Chinese AI office software is heading, saying WPS’s mature AI ecosystem suits workplaces across the Middle East. The two sides have discussed bringing WPS 365 to UAE government agencies and partnering with local universities to train young AI talent, he said.
What happened in Zhuhai that day is a small window onto a larger pattern. WPS Office is now used in more than 220 countries and regions, and in Indonesia its tablet app, WPS for Pad, recently reached No. 1 on the App Store’s free productivity chart and Business chart. The reach has registered beyond China, too: Forbes recently profiled Kingsoft Office’s AI strategy, describing it as the most practical path toward an AI-native future.