The world's largest natural gas exporter grew at an average pace of 17.4 percent over the past five years and it is set to largely outperform fellow Gulf oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in coming years.

"It gives a comfort that Qatar proved to be the most resilient economy in the Gulf Cooperation Council throughout the crisis," said Farah Ahmed Hersi, senior economist at Masraf Al-Rayan in Doha.

"The economy is extremely robust ... and it will continue to grow at even a higher pace," he said.

The 2009 growth figure is below the 11 percent cited by OPEC member's deputy prime minister in January, revised data from the statistics office showed.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected the cash-rich economy to grow by 9.5 percent in 2009. The GDP jumped by 25.4 percent in 2008, the data showed, much higher than 15.8 percent reported previously.

Qatar has performed better than its Gulf peers due to a massive expansion of gas facilities. The government also moved quickly to shore up risks in the banking sector and ramped up spending.

The crisis has still hit Qatar, which pegs its currency to the dollar, with a real estate downturn helping push the country into deflation last year.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter and the largest Arab economy, only managed to grow by 0.2 percent last year hit by lower oil prices and slow credit growth, while the UAE and Kuwait are expected to have shrunk.

The Qatari statisticians re-introduced reporting real GDP growth and revised growth rates both in constant 2004 prices and current prices for 2005-2009, saying they were trying to collect producer prices to measure real GDP more accurately.

"These are preliminary results and are subject to revisions as more information is gathered but our estimates revisions, in future of the past data, will not be as big as we experienced," Qatar Statistics Authority said.

The QSA also said it was developing a system of short-term indicators, which will be compiled quarterly and released within a quarter after the reference quarter.

The office did not publish real GDP data by expenditure, only giving the breakdown by industrial sectors. Economic data are hard to find across the Gulf with some oil producers lagging by months, though the situation has been improving recently.

The oil and gas sector grew by 7.7 percent in real terms last year, accounting for 49.6 percent of GDP. Government services with an 11.6 percent share saw a 43.2 percent jump, while construction tumbled by 21.8 percent.

A Reuters poll showed last month Qatar's economy was likely to expand by 16.1 percent this year due to higher gas output as Asia recovers. Fiscal stimulus will also stay strong unlike elsewhere in the world with a 25 percent spending jump.

Meanwhile, Qatar is pumping growing amounts of helium as a by-product of gas output and aims to become the world's second largest  helium producer with a new plant, its energy minister said on Thursday.

Qatar exports liquefied natural gas (LNG) with gas output from its giant North Field, the world's largest known pure natural gas reservoir.

Helium is used in medical diagnostics such as MRI scanners and has industrial applications for semiconductor processing, fiber optics and welding. It is the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen.

The Gulf Arab state's second helium plant would come on line in 2013 and purify and liquify helium recovered from the North Field, Energy Minister Abdullah Al-Attiyah said on Thursday.

The volume of sales gas from the Qatar 2 Helium Project would be 1.3 billion cubic feet per year, Al-Attiyah said. It would make Qatar second only to the United States in helium output, he added.

"Helium is rarely found in quantities large enough to justify economic extraction," Al-Attiyah said. "Since 2000, world demand for helium has increased by about 20 percent - the bulk of this increasing demand can be met from Qatar's North Field for many years."

Worldwide demand for helium stands at around 6 billion cubic feet per year, according to Qatari LNG producer RasGas, which would manage the helium plant.

Qatar's first helium facility came on stream in 2005 with a capacity of 700 million cubic feet per year.