DIWAN · REGISTER
Reading the register.
Studies & Intelligence
Intelligence with context. Foresight that shapes decisions. The DIWAN register publishes commissioned studies, briefings, and market intelligence across sectors and jurisdictions.
AllTrade & Capital 79Law & Regulation 46Country Files 196Demand & Buyers 45Platforms & Growth 180Brand & Positioning 4Commodities 23Business 69Technology 188Cyber Security 4
All
United Arab Emirates 49
Saudi Arabia 39
Qatar 14
Singapore 10
Oman 6
Bahrain 4
China 4
Guinea 3
Egypt 2
Kuwait 2
Samoa 2
Sudan 2
Albania 1
Algeria 1
American Samoa 1
Andorra 1
Angola 1
Antigua and Barbuda 1
Argentina 1
Aruba 1
Australia 1
Austria 1
Azerbaijan 1
Bangladesh 1
Barbados 1
Belarus 1
Belize 1
Bermuda 1
Bolivia 1
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1
Brazil 1
British Virgin Islands 1
Brunei Darussalam 1
Bulgaria 1
Cabo Verde 1
Cambodia 1
Canada 1
Cayman Islands 1
Central African Republic 1
Chad 1
Channel Islands 1
Chile 1
Costa Rica 1
Croatia 1
Cuba 1
Cyprus 1
Czechia 1
Denmark 1
Dominica 1
Dominican Republic 1
Ecuador 1
Equatorial Guinea 1
Eritrea 1
Estonia 1
Eswatini 1
Finland 1
France 1
French Polynesia 1
Gabon 1
Georgia 1
Germany 1
Gibraltar 1
Greece 1
Greenland 1
Grenada 1
Guam 1
Guatemala 1
Guyana 1
Haiti 1
Hungary 1
India 1
Indonesia 1
Isle of Man 1
Israel 1
Italy 1
Jamaica 1
Jordan 1
Kazakhstan 1
Kiribati 1
Kosovo 1
Latvia 1
Lesotho 1
Liberia 1
Libya 1
Lithuania 1
Luxembourg 1
Malawi 1
Malaysia 1
Malta 1
Mauritania 1
Mauritius 1
Mexico 1
Monaco 1
Mongolia 1
Montenegro 1
Morocco 1
Mozambique 1
Myanmar 1
Nepal 1
Netherlands 1
New Caledonia 1
Niger 1
Nigeria 1
North Macedonia 1
Northern Mariana Islands 1
Pakistan 1
Palau 1
Panama 1
Papua New Guinea 1
Paraguay 1
Peru 1
Philippines 1
Poland 1
Romania 1
Rwanda 1
San Marino 1
Senegal 1
Sierra Leone 1
Slovenia 1
Solomon Islands 1
South Africa 1
South Sudan 1
Spain 1
Sri Lanka 1
Suriname 1
Sweden 1
Switzerland 1
Syrian Arab Republic 1
Tajikistan 1
Tanzania 1
Timor-Leste 1
Togo 1
Trinidad and Tobago 1
Tunisia 1
Turkey 1
Turkmenistan 1
Turks and Caicos Islands 1
Tuvalu 1
Ukraine 1
United Kingdom 1
Uruguay 1
Vanuatu 1
Vietnam 1
West Bank and Gaza 1
Zimbabwe 1
United Arab Emirates 49Saudi Arabia 39Qatar 14Singapore 10Oman 6Bahrain 4China 4Guinea 3Egypt 2Kuwait 2Samoa 2Sudan 2Albania 1Algeria 1American Samoa 1Andorra 1Angola 1Antigua and Barbuda 1Argentina 1Aruba 1Australia 1Austria 1Azerbaijan 1Bangladesh 1Barbados 1Belarus 1Belize 1Bermuda 1Bolivia 1Bosnia and Herzegovina 1Brazil 1British Virgin Islands 1Brunei Darussalam 1Bulgaria 1Cabo Verde 1Cambodia 1Canada 1Cayman Islands 1Central African Republic 1Chad 1Channel Islands 1Chile 1Costa Rica 1Croatia 1Cuba 1Cyprus 1Czechia 1Denmark 1Dominica 1Dominican Republic 1Ecuador 1Equatorial Guinea 1Eritrea 1Estonia 1Eswatini 1Finland 1France 1French Polynesia 1Gabon 1Georgia 1Germany 1Gibraltar 1Greece 1Greenland 1Grenada 1Guam 1Guatemala 1Guyana 1Haiti 1Hungary 1India 1Indonesia 1Isle of Man 1Israel 1Italy 1Jamaica 1Jordan 1Kazakhstan 1Kiribati 1Kosovo 1Latvia 1Lesotho 1Liberia 1Libya 1Lithuania 1Luxembourg 1Malawi 1Malaysia 1Malta 1Mauritania 1Mauritius 1Mexico 1Monaco 1Mongolia 1Montenegro 1Morocco 1Mozambique 1Myanmar 1Nepal 1Netherlands 1New Caledonia 1Niger 1Nigeria 1North Macedonia 1Northern Mariana Islands 1Pakistan 1Palau 1Panama 1Papua New Guinea 1Paraguay 1Peru 1Philippines 1Poland 1Romania 1Rwanda 1San Marino 1Senegal 1Sierra Leone 1Slovenia 1Solomon Islands 1South Africa 1South Sudan 1Spain 1Sri Lanka 1Suriname 1Sweden 1Switzerland 1Syrian Arab Republic 1Tajikistan 1Tanzania 1Timor-Leste 1Togo 1Trinidad and Tobago 1Tunisia 1Turkey 1Turkmenistan 1Turks and Caicos Islands 1Tuvalu 1Ukraine 1United Kingdom 1Uruguay 1Vanuatu 1Vietnam 1West Bank and Gaza 1Zimbabwe 1Country Files
Photo · Rahul Joglekar / Unsplash
Feasibility
Market Signal: Sovereign Scale, Infrastructure Rails
Three GCC platform signals, 5 September – 5 October 2026: Qatar's outbound turn, Riyadh's rotation into business infrastructure, and the 8:1 SME credit overhang
Thirty days of disclosures show the GCC platform economy's capital stack institutionalising: QIA deployed into AI silicon ($875M Positron Series C) and signed $20B with J.P. Morgan AM; a single Saudi week put ~$65M into four B2B infrastructure platforms, half anchored by PIF-linked investors and two blended with sukuk; and erad's $22M Series A disclosed SAR 4B of SME financing applications against SAR 500M deployed. The window favours business-infrastructure builders — especially where transaction data can become underwriting.
$1.6B / 22 dealsDISCLOSED GCC/ME STARTUP INVESTMENT, FIRST 20 DAYS OF SEPTEMBER 2026
~$45BQIA OUTBOUND ASSET-MANAGEMENT MANDATES DISCLOSED IN 2026 (J.P. MORGAN + GOLDMAN SACHS)
SAR 4B vs 500M (8:1)ERAD SME FINANCING APPLICATIONS VS CAPITAL DEPLOYED
Photo · Oualid Lakhrouti / Unsplash
Feasibility
Market Signal: Platform in the GCC
Two signals from the past 30 days: capital is rotating into B2B platform rails, while consumer platforms split into disciplined winners and cash-burning strugglers
Two market signals define the GCC platform economy right now. First, growth capital is rotating away from consumer apps and into B2B platform infrastructure — Riyadh-based SME-financing platform erad closed a $22m Series A on 28 September 2026, the latest in a run of rails-and-infrastructure rounds (Stitch, Fasset, qlub) that now absorb the region's smartest money. Second, consumer platform economics have split: Tamara turned profitable at scale while Tabby's Saudi loan book contracted, and Talabat raised guidance on the back of non-Gulf growth while its home GCC markets slowed to ~5%. The window rewards operators who own a defensible rail, and punishes subsidised growth. This study reads both signals, sizes the context, and names who should act.
$22mERAD SERIES A, CLOSED 28 SEP 2026 (MEVP-LED)
+152%TAMARA SAUDI Q2 2026 REVENUE GROWTH, YOY
−11%TABBY SAUDI LOAN-BOOK CHANGE SINCE MARCH 2026
Photo · Stijn te Strake / Unsplash
Country intelligence
Saudi Arabia: First Reading 2026
Economic and Social Projections
By 2025, Saudi Arabia's GDP is projected to reach USD 1.28 trillion, with a real GDP growth rate of 4.5%. The population is anticipated to grow to 37.0 million, with a high urbanisation rate of 84.6%. Inflation is expected to remain stable at 2.1%, while the unemployment rate is projected to decrease to 3%. These trends indicate a recovering economy amidst ongoing challenges.
USD 1.28 trillionGDP, CURRENT USD (2025)
4.5REAL GDP GROWTH (2025)
USD 34,537GDP PER CAPITA, CURRENT USD (2025)
Photo · PhotoHound / Unsplash
Feasibility
GCC Platform Signals: Compute Courts Capital
HUMAIN races to market for data-centre money while ADGM posts a 54% AUM surge — the Gulf platform buildout turns from sovereign cheque-book to open capital markets
Two September 2026 signals — Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN beginning IPO preparations and raising a US$2.5bn domestic data-centre fund (6–9 Sep), and Abu Dhabi’s ADGM reporting 54% AUM growth with over US$100bn of AI-focused capital (8 Sep) — mark the moment the GCC’s platform buildout starts financing itself through open markets rather than sovereign equity. This study reads the two signals together, maps the capital stack forming around Gulf compute, and identifies who should act, and when.
+54%ADGM ASSETS UNDER MANAGEMENT, H1 2026 VS H1 2025
US$2.5bnHUMAIN DOMESTIC DATA-CENTRE FUND TARGET (BSF CAPITAL)
>US$100bnAI-FOCUSED CAPITAL HELD BY ADGM-BASED ENTITIES
Photo · Kenny / Unsplash
Feasibility
GCC Platform Watch: Down the Stack
Two signals from the last 30 days — Saudi and Qatari national payment cards go cross-border, and Saudi banks put $50 million behind the region's open-banking plumbing — mark the Gulf platform contest moving from apps to infrastructure, and the playbook for who should act
In the 30 days to 22 September 2026, the GCC platform economy moved down the stack. The land wars of the app layer — delivery, BNPL, marketplaces — gave way to a contest over the plumbing beneath them. Two signals carry the shift. On 15 September, the Saudi Central Bank and Qatar Central Bank announced that the Kingdom's mada and Qatar's HIMYAN national payment cards will be accepted across both countries, a gradual ATM-and-POS rollout riding the Gulf Payment Network. A week earlier, open-banking platform Tarabut closed US$50 million in strategic financing led not by venture funds but by the Saudi banks that run on its rails — Riyad Bank, SAB's X-Tech Fund, GIB, with Zamil Group and Kanoo Ventures alongside. Read together against SAMA's disclosure that Saudi fintech investment has passed SAR 30 billion and that electronic payments now exceed 85% of retail transactions, the message is that the next platform fortunes in the Gulf will be made in infrastructure ownership, not customer acquisition. This edition sets out both signals, the numbers beneath them, and who should act in the window before the rollout reaches e-commerce.
SAR 30bn+SAUDI FINTECH INVESTMENT BY END-H1 2026
$50mTARABUT STRATEGIC FINANCING, SAUDI-BANK-LED
$1.85bnBARQ SERIES A VALUATION AT MONEY20/20
Photo · Tati Odintsova / Unsplash
Feasibility
GCC Platform Watch: Rails Go Regional, Licences Stay National
Two market signals from the last 30 days — a single-integration GCC acquiring platform, and Riyadh turning licensing into the industry's main stage — and the playbook for who should act
In the 30 days to 20 September 2026, the GCC platform economy moved on two fronts. Network International launched a GCC-wide acquiring capability that lets a merchant accept payments across the Gulf through one integration — the first serious attempt to collapse the region's fragmented payment rails into a single technical surface. Ten days later, Money20/20 Middle East opened in Riyadh hosted not by a bank or a vendor but by Saudi Arabia's financial regulators, confirming that the entry gate to the region's largest market is now a licence, not a launch. Together the signals define the current arbitrage: distribution is regionalising faster than regulation. Operators who sequence licence-first, rails-second can reach six markets with one stack; those who invert the order will find the rails ready and the doors shut.
$617MMENA FINTECH FUNDING, H1 2026 (MAGNITT)
57FINTECH DEALS, H1 2026 — DOWN 50% YOY
37%SHARE OF H1 FINTECH FUNDING TAKEN BY ONE ROUND (MAL)
Photo · Gamze Teoman / Unsplash
Feasibility
GCC Platform Signal: The Delivery Edition
In one fortnight the Gulf platform economy stopped announcing and started shipping - sovereign AI compute went live in Riyadh and is heading for an IPO, while the dirham digital-money stack left the sandbox for the checkout counter
Two market signals from the thirty days to mid-September 2026: (1) HUMAIN's Riyadh AI infrastructure went into production with AMD and Cisco - with up to 250 MW more from 2027, a 1 GW target by 2030, a MiniMax-based frontier model, and an IPO preparation team now being assembled for contemplated Riyadh and New York listings; (2) five layers of a regulated digital-dirham economy moved in nine days - an in-store AED-stablecoin pilot, two stored-value clearances, a cross-border payments approval, an institutional crypto desk, and a Hong Kong-Dubai capital-markets working group. What is moving, who should act, and the scorecard on last edition's calls (three of four landed within days).
1 GWHUMAIN AI INFRASTRUCTURE TARGET BY 2030 (UP TO 250 MW NEXT PHASE FROM 2027)
Riyadh + New YorkDUAL LISTINGS CONTEMPLATED AS HUMAIN ASSEMBLES ITS IPO PREPARATION TEAM
5 layers in 9 daysDIRHAM DIGITAL-MONEY STACK MOVES, SEP 3-11: SETTLEMENT, WALLETS, CROSS-BORDER, INSTITUTIONAL ASSETS, CORRIDORS
Photo · Unsplash
Feasibility
GCC Platform Signal: The Single Rail Edition
Two signals in thirty days — a GCC-wide single-integration payments rail and a $375M capital barbell — just repriced regional expansion for every Gulf platform
Two market signals crossed in the thirty days to 10 September 2026. Network International switched on GCC-wide acquiring through a single integration (4 Sep), collapsing the payments fragmentation that taxed every regional expansion. Three days later, Wamda's August data confirmed a barbelled capital market: $375M across just 27 deals, 97% into the UAE, ~85% into Series C — while sovereign-adjacent funds batch-seeded platforms in Oman and a new Saudi growth fund launched. Read together: the cost of going regional just fell as the reward for being regional rose. This feasibility study quantifies both signals and answers who should act, and how, in the next ninety days.
$375M / 27 dealsMENA STARTUP FUNDING, AUGUST 2026 (WAMDA)
97%SHARE OF AUGUST CAPITAL CAPTURED BY THE UAE
~85%AUGUST CAPITAL DEPLOYED IN SERIES C ROUNDS
Photo · سيف الظاهر / Unsplash
Feasibility
The Attention Edition — The Gulf Just Bought the World's Games
Sixth reading of the GCC platform signal: a $55bn take-private of Electronic Arts closes, a $38bn gaming stack matures, and the region's flagship esports stage spends a year in Paris. Who owns the attention economy, who hosts it, and who should act.
The sixth reading of the GCC platform signal turns to the layer every prior edition left untouched: interactive entertainment — the largest attention platform on earth. In the first week of August 2026 a PIF-led consortium completed the take-private of Electronic Arts at $55 billion, reported as the largest leveraged buyout in history, placing Battlefield, The Sims and EA Sports FC under Gulf ownership. Beneath it sits a maturing operating stack: Savvy Games Group's $38 billion mandate has produced Scopely ($4.9bn, now $15bn lifetime revenue), the Niantic games business ($3.5bn), a reported ~$6bn Moonton pursuit and a $12bn transfer of listed gaming stakes. Yet in the same window the Esports World Cup — the region's flagship live product — relocated its 2026 edition from Riyadh to Paris amid regional conflict. The study's central finding: content ownership is portable and compounding in Gulf hands, while hosting the attention economy at home remains exposed to geopolitics. The gap between those two layers is where the next 24 months of opportunity and risk sit.
$55bnELECTRONIC ARTS TAKE-PRIVATE COMPLETED 4–5 AUG 2026 — REPORTED LARGEST LBO IN HISTORY
$38bnSAVVY GAMES GROUP MANDATE FROM PIF (2022) BEHIND THE SCOPELY–NIANTIC–MOONTON STACK
$75mESPORTS WORLD CUP 2026 PRIZE POOL — STAGED IN PARIS, NOT RIYADH, THIS YEAR
Photo · Thomas Haas / Unsplash
Legal review
What the Gulf Actually Asks a Legal Platform
An eight-week read of real reader demand on a GCC legal Ask desk — and the cited answers to the four questions that dominate it
Aggregate, anonymised demand on the Ask desk of LEX — a Forfait platform and technology intermediary, not a law firm — shows GCC readers overwhelmingly ask navigational questions, not doctrinal ones: which jurisdiction to enter (UAE mainland vs ADGM vs DIFC), what directors owe under ADGM's English-law regime, how exits are priced in employment (notice bands and gratuity), and whether a contract can be ended for convenience across UAE, KSA and the financial free zones. This study reads the demand signal, then answers each cluster with primary-source citations.
≈45%SHARE OF SUBSTANTIVE READER DEMAND ABOUT ENTITY FORMATION AND JURISDICTION CHOICE
USD 1.2bnGCC AI-POWERED LEGAL-RESEARCH MARKET, 2024 (KEN RESEARCH)
7 / 30 / 90 daysDIFC MINIMUM TERMINATION NOTICE BANDS (EMPLOYMENT LAW NO. 2 OF 2019)
Photo · Unsplash
Feasibility
The GCC Platform Economy — Thirty Days That Reset the Board
Consolidation, capital rotation and the new platform map of the Gulf · signal window 16 July – 16 August 2026
Two market signals defined the Gulf platform economy over the past thirty days: global consolidation arrived at the region's front door when Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero — parent of Talabat and HungerStation — for $14.8bn, and regional venture capital rotated hard toward Saudi Arabia, debt instruments and B2B e-commerce while Gulf sovereign-adjacent funds wrote their largest-ever cheque into a global AI platform. This feasibility read maps what moved, what the numbers say, and who should act — operators, merchants, investors and watchers of the reopening IPO window.
$14.8bnUBER'S AGREED OFFER FOR DELIVERY HERO, PARENT OF TALABAT AND HUNGERSTATION
+5% vs +41%TALABAT GMV GROWTH, Q2 2026 — GCC VS NON-GCC
$172.6m · 56% debtMENA VENTURE FUNDING, JULY 2026 (EX-MEGA-DEALS), OF WHICH DEBT
Photo · Roger Starnes Sr / Unsplash
Feasibility
The Gulf Data-Centre Race: Power, Chips and the New Digital Geography
Announced gigawatts, energized megawatts, and who actually captures the AI workloads
The Gulf has announced between 5 and 11 gigawatts of sovereign AI data-centre capacity while roughly 500 megawatts of third-party capacity is live today. This study benchmarks the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar against the two constrained incumbents — Singapore and Ireland — across capacity, power economics, latency position and regulation, and maps who captures which workloads to 2030.
5-11 GWSOVEREIGN AI CAMPUS CAPACITY ANNOUNCED ACROSS THE GCC
~500 MWGCC THIRD-PARTY DATA-CENTRE CAPACITY LIVE TODAY
~20%SHARE OF IRELAND'S METERED ELECTRICITY CONSUMED BY DATA CENTRES
Photo · Jeffrey Eisen / Unsplash
Masterplan
Feeding the Gulf: The Food-Security Investment Map 2026–2030
Where sovereign capital is pulling private money — UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar benchmarked against the Netherlands and Israel, and the four-segment stack priced
Gulf food-security capital has moved upstream: over US$7 billion of verified sovereign and state-linked deals since 2020 now target the grain trade itself, while domestic production consolidates around what survives the desert P&L. This study benchmarks the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar against their two explicit reference systems — the Netherlands and Israel — then prices the four-segment investable stack: greenhouse-first controlled-environment agriculture, sovereign-anchored aquaculture, cash-yielding cold chain, and alternative proteins as a regulatory call option under Abu Dhabi's 2025 halal-integrated novel-food framework. It closes with the four co-investment structures that repeat across every disclosed transaction, and a candid risk register.
US$7bn+VERIFIED SOVEREIGN & STATE-LINKED AGRI-FOOD COMMITMENTS SINCE 2020
>90%SHARE OF UAE FOOD SUPPLY THAT IS IMPORTED
US$23.7BMEA COLD-CHAIN MARKET BY 2034 (FROM US$13.1B IN 2025)
Photo · Nick Fewings / Unsplash
Masterplan
Sovereign AI in the Gulf: Compute, Models and Talent — Who Actually Leads
Announcement versus deployment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — benchmarked against Singapore and France
The Gulf sovereign-AI race has split into three distinct strategies: the UAE is deploying (a gigawatt-class campus physically under construction, chips export-licensed, a US$49bn infrastructure fund closed, and a continuous cadence of shipped models), Saudi Arabia is announcing at the largest scale (6.6GW by 2034) while execution is still early, and Qatar has pivoted to capital-as-strategy, buying exposure rather than building gigawatts. Benchmarked against Singapore and France, the UAE currently leads on execution score; the binding constraint for every programme is US chip-export approval, which has quietly become the real scoreboard.
200 MWFIRST GULF GIGAWATT-CLASS CAMPUS PHASE DUE ONLINE — STARGATE UAE, Q3 2026
6.6 GWHUMAIN ANNOUNCED COMPUTE TARGET BY 2034
US$49bnMGX FUND I CLOSED COMMITMENTS, JULY 2026
Photo · Zlaťáky.cz / Unsplash
Masterplan
The Silicon Sovereigns: How Gulf Capital Is Buying Its Way Into the AI Order
Compute, equity and chip diplomacy: an audit of what Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha are actually acquiring in the artificial-intelligence build-out
Between Microsoft's $1.5bn stake in G42 in April 2024 and the $49bn close of Abu Dhabi's MGX fund in July 2026, Gulf sovereign capital moved from the periphery of artificial intelligence to a load-bearing position in its financing. This study benchmarks the Gulf's sovereign AI vehicles against their Singaporean peers and finds that what the sovereigns are buying, in descending order of certainty, is compute, equity and influence — with access to American chips, not capital, as the binding constraint.
$49bnFINAL CLOSE OF MGX'S DEDICATED AI FUND, ANNOUNCED 1 JULY 2026 — THE LARGEST SINGLE AI-FOCUSED INVESTMENT VEHICLE ON RECORD (SOURCE: CNBC, BLOOMBERG)
5 GWPLANNED CAPACITY OF THE STARGATE UAE CAMPUS IN ABU DHABI, THE LARGEST AI COMPUTE CLUSTER ANNOUNCED OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES (SOURCE: OPENAI, G42, SOFTBANK, MAY 2025)
~70,000GB300-CLASS NVIDIA CHIPS COVERED BY THE FIRST-TRANCHE NOVEMBER 2025 US EXPORT AUTHORIZATIONS TO G42 AND HUMAIN; DIWAN AGGREGATION OF TRADE-PRESS TALLIES (SOURCE: US DEPT OF COMMERCE STATEMENT, 19 NOV 2025)
Photo · Dayne Topkin / Unsplash
Customer research
Easy to Start, Hard to Keep Clean: The UAE SME Formation and Compliance Market
Formation venues compete on price and speed; the durable cost of owning a UAE company now sits in the tax-and-filing stack that follows
The UAE remains one of the cheapest and fastest places in the Gulf to incorporate, with entry licenses from roughly AED 6,000 and approval in days. Since corporate tax took effect in June 2023, however, the recurring compliance line — registration, bookkeeping, VAT and corporate tax filings — has become broadly venue-independent and often exceeds the annual license renewal itself. This study benchmarks five formation venues against Saudi and Bahraini references and sizes the services market that keeps the country's ~557,000 SMEs clean.
~557,000SMES OPERATING IN THE UAE AT END-2022 — THE INSTALLED BASE THE COMPLIANCE-SERVICES MARKET SERVES (SOURCE: UAE MINISTRY OF ECONOMY, VIA WAM)
AED 375,000THE DOUBLE THRESHOLD: TAXABLE INCOME ABOVE IT ATTRACTS 9% CORPORATE TAX, AND TAXABLE SUPPLIES ABOVE IT FORCE VAT REGISTRATION (SOURCE: FEDERAL DECREE-LAW 47 OF 2022; FEDERAL DECREE-LAW 8 OF 2017)
AED 10,000ADMINISTRATIVE PENALTY FOR LATE CORPORATE TAX REGISTRATION, WAIVABLE UNDER THE FTA'S 2025 INITIATIVE FOR ENTITIES FILING WITHIN SEVEN MONTHS OF THEIR FIRST PERIOD END (SOURCE: CABINET DECISION 75 OF 2023 AS AMENDED; FEDERAL TAX AUTHORITY)
Photo · Bernd 📷 Dittrich / Unsplash
Masterplan
The Journey Economy: Mapping MENA's Travel and Experiences Market
Beyond hotel counts: pilgrimage volumes, giga-project supply and the young intra-regional traveller reshaping the region's visitor economy
MENA's five headline travel markets each closed 2025 with record arrivals, a synchronised peak the region has not produced before. This study maps the market beyond hotel counts: tourism's GDP contribution, religious travel volumes, the under-digitised experiences layer, Saudi giga-project supply, and the young domestic and intra-regional demand that actually fills the rooms.
122mTOURIST VISITS TO SAUDI ARABIA IN 2025, DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL COMBINED (SOURCE: SAUDI MINISTRY OF TOURISM, VIA ARAB NEWS)
$178bnTRAVEL AND TOURISM CONTRIBUTION TO SAUDI GDP IN 2025, UP 7.4 PER CENT YEAR ON YEAR (SOURCE: WTTC, VIA ARAB NEWS)
19.59mINTERNATIONAL OVERNIGHT VISITORS TO DUBAI IN 2025, A THIRD CONSECUTIVE RECORD YEAR (SOURCE: DUBAI DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMY AND TOURISM)
