How to Win in Gulf Retail

Lessons from the World’s Next Retail Frontier

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The Gulf has produced some of the world’s most successful retailers, yet they appear to have won through entirely different strategies. Landmark built proprietary brands. Alshaya mastered franchising. Lulu focused on underserved customers. If opposite strategies can all succeed, what separates enduring winners from temporary winners? The answer offers valuable lessons for retailers seeking lasting advantage in the world’s next retail frontier.

A Region Where Opposite Strategies All Win

Most business success stories are comforting because they appear to confirm what managers already believe. Companies succeed because they chose the right strategy. They owned the brand instead of franchising it. They built premium instead of value. They invested in digital before competitors did. The implication is reassuring: identify the winning strategy and replicate it.

The Gulf refuses to cooperate with that logic.

Over the past five decades, one of the world’s youngest, fastest-growing, and most internationally connected consumer markets has produced an extraordinary cluster of retail giants. Yet they did not follow the same playbook. Some built fortunes by owning brands; others became global leaders operating brands they would never own. Some pursued affluent nationals; others began by serving migrant workers whom almost everyone else overlooked. Their strategies contradict one another. Their success does not.

Three stories illustrate the puzzle.

In 1973, a grieving young man in Bahrain inherited six thousand dollars and his late brother’s unrealized franchise agreement with Mothercare. Most people in that position would have honored the plan already in motion. Mukesh "Micky" Jagtiani chose a different path. Rather than build someone else’s brand, he opened his own shop under his own name, selling what he chose to stock. What began as a single store eventually became Landmark Group, one of the largest retail businesses in the Middle East and Africa, operating more than 2,200 stores across 30 million square feet of retail space spanning the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

A few hundred kilometers away and in the same year, an eighteen-year-old named Yusuff Ali arrived in Abu Dhabi from India to help his uncle import frozen food. Thousands of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi workers were pouring into a Gulf transformed by oil wealth, yet few retailers were designed around their needs. Yusuff Ali saw an underserved customer before he saw a retail format. Decades later, that observation became Lulu Group, the GCC’s largest home-grown retailer. When Lulu Retail listed on the Abu Dhabi exchange in November 2024, the offering raised $1.72 billion, drew $37 billion in demand, and was oversubscribed more than twenty-five times—the UAE’s largest listing of the year.

Years later in Kuwait, a young Wharton graduate named Mohammed Alshaya saw opportunity where competitors saw retreat. In the uncertain years following the Gulf War, rival trading businesses abandoned valuable retail locations they could no longer justify holding. Alshaya moved into the spaces they left behind, not to build his own brands, but to become the world’s most accomplished operator of other people’s brands. Today, Alshaya operates some seventy international brands across more than 4,000 stores in eighteen countries—among them 2,000 Starbucks locations alone.

Three founders. Three decisions. Three entirely different theories of how to build a retail business. Jagtiani chose ownership. Alshaya chose operation. Yusuff Ali chose an overlooked customer.

All three won.

The puzzle deepens when the evidence expands. Add Majid Al Futtaim, which transformed shopping destinations into strategic assets. Add Al-Futtaim, which built one of the region’s most enduring businesses around exclusive automotive distribution. Add Xcite, which created a defensible position in consumer electronics despite owning none of the global brands it sold. Add Apparel Group, steadily moving beyond its origins as a franchise operator. Add Cenomi, whose near-collapse provides an equally important lesson about the limits of growth.

Together, these eight retailers represent more than half a century of retail evolution across the Gulf. Read individually, they appear to support entirely different theories of success. Read together, they raise a far more interesting possibility: that strategy itself may not be the variable separating retailers that endure from those that eventually struggle.

This article draws on a multi-year study of these eight defining Gulf retailers. Its argument is not that they discovered a single winning strategy. Quite the opposite. The evidence suggests there is no single way to win in retail. The enduring winners often chose opposite paths. What they shared was something else entirely. The rest of this article is an attempt to understand what that was.

Why the Gulf Matters to Global Retail

It is tempting to view the Gulf as a special case. Its economies were shaped by oil wealth. Its cities grew at extraordinary speed. Its populations were transformed by migration. Seen from this perspective, these stories may appear interesting but ultimately unique.

That would be a mistake. The fundamental challenge confronting these companies is not unique to the region. It is the same challenge confronting retailers everywhere: how do you convert growth into endurance?

Growth remains possible everywhere, but growth alone no longer guarantees resilience. Many retailers continue to expand while finding themselves increasingly dependent on suppliers, platforms, landlords, marketplaces, or global brands that control critical parts of the value chain. The Gulf retailers offer a different perspective. They suggest that enduring advantage is not primarily determined by format, geography, category, or even strategy. The most successful among them used one stage of growth to create assets that would strengthen the next, treating expansion not as an end in itself but as an opportunity to increase ownership of the capabilities, relationships, brands, destinations, channels, and ecosystems that would shape their future.

The scale of what comes next sharpens the point. Alpen Capital projects retail sales in Saudi Arabia and the UAE alone to reach roughly $300 billion by 2028—nearly four-fifths of all GCC retail—while Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 targets 150 million tourist visits a year. If retail has a next frontier, this is what it looks like.

There is another reason these stories matter. For decades, management thinking has largely flowed from West to East. Yet many of the most interesting business experiments of the past half century have taken place elsewhere, and the Gulf is one such laboratory. Within a single generation, the region created modern consumer markets, built globally competitive companies, and developed retail ecosystems that rival those of far older economies. The speed of that transformation compressed decades of learning into a short period—and compressed learning reveals strategic patterns with unusual clarity.

What emerged from this study was not a formula for success but a way of thinking about endurance. Every period of growth presents a choice: companies can use success to expand what they do today, or to build assets that will matter tomorrow. The former increases scale. The latter increases resilience. The most successful retailers in the Gulf managed to do both—which is why the Enduring Ladder is ultimately less a framework for understanding Gulf retail than a framework for understanding how enduring businesses are built anywhere in the world.

Looking Beyond Strategy

The obvious place to begin was strategy itself. After all, strategy is how business success is usually explained. Success, in this view, is largely the reward for making better strategic choices than competitors.

A disclosure is necessary before going further. I spent more than three decades leading retail businesses across the Gulf and beyond, including two of the eight companies examined here—Xcite, as its chief executive, and Landmark Group, where I led the retail business. That experience is both an asset and a liability for a researcher. It provides access and context an outsider cannot easily acquire; it also creates an obvious risk of partiality. I have tried to subject the businesses I once led to the same scrutiny as the other six, and readers can judge for themselves whether I have succeeded.

The eight retailers appeared to support the strategic explanation—at least initially. Looked at individually, each story seemed persuasive. Looked at together, they became confusing. If Landmark proved the value of ownership, Alshaya appeared to prove the opposite. If Lulu demonstrated the power of customer insight, Majid Al Futtaim suggested that place could matter as much as customer. If Al-Futtaim showed the strength of exclusive agency relationships, Xcite appeared to succeed without any such advantage. Every retailer seemed to validate a different theory. The more examples that were added, the less convincing any single explanation became.

The breakthrough came from asking a different question. Instead of focusing on what each retailer sold, which customers it served, or which strategy it pursued, what if we focused on what it was becoming?

Viewed through that lens, something interesting began to emerge. The most enduring retailers were not simply growing. They were changing the nature of what they owned. Each successive phase of growth left them owning more of what created value in the business and depending less on assets controlled by someone else. What was striking was not that these retailers owned the same things—they clearly did not. What was striking was that they were all moving in the same direction.

That distinction may be one of the most underappreciated ideas in retail: growth and ownership are not the same thing. A retailer can double its store count, expand into new countries, add brands, increase sales, and still remain heavily dependent on assets it does not control. Another can grow more slowly while steadily increasing ownership of the assets that shape its future. From a distance, both appear successful. When conditions change, the difference becomes visible.

The question was no longer why these retailers had chosen different strategies. The question was whether those different strategies were all leading toward the same destination.

The Enduring Ladder

The answer became visible only when the retailers were viewed not as snapshots in time but as journeys unfolding over decades.

Most retail histories are written as stories of expansion, with success measured in size. Yet when the histories of these eight retailers were examined closely, size alone turned out to be an incomplete explanation. Some retailers became larger without becoming stronger. Others seemed to become stronger with every stage of growth. The difference lay in what growth was producing.

Landmark’s story is often told as one of extraordinary expansion across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Yet what ultimately transformed the company was not the number of stores it opened but the gradual creation of assets it controlled itself: brands such as Max, Splash, Home Centre, Babyshop, and Home Box that customers actively sought out. Lulu’s original insight was customer-focused—serving expatriate communities that many retailers overlooked—but customer insight alone does not create a moat. Over time, Lulu built sourcing networks, food-processing capabilities, logistics infrastructure, private labels, and digital channels around that relationship. Majid Al Futtaim’s most enduring asset was never simply a collection of stores; it was the destination itself. Consumers chose to visit Mall of the Emirates or City Centre irrespective of which retailers happened to occupy them. Al-Futtaim used decades of success with Toyota to expand into finance, insurance, real estate, and services. Even Alshaya, often viewed as evidence against ownership, accumulated capabilities, customer relationships, digital assets, and strategic real estate that became valuable in their own right—including a stake of roughly 34 percent in Mabanee, the listed owner of The Avenues, Kuwait’s largest mall. The world’s archetypal brand renter quietly became co-owner of some of the region’s most valuable retail real estate: a franchise operator still, yet progressively less dependent on any single franchise relationship.

The pattern appeared so consistently that it eventually demanded a name. I call it the Enduring Ladder.

The Ladder has five rungs. At the bottom sits rented advantage: the retailer sells brands it does not own in spaces it does not control, and its position depends on the continued goodwill of others. The second rung is operational ownership: sourcing networks, logistics, and execution capabilities that belong to the retailer even when the products do not. The third is customer ownership: direct channels, loyalty programs, and data that give the retailer access to the customer independent of any location or brand. The fourth is asset ownership: proprietary brands, private labels, destinations, and exclusive agencies—value that competitors cannot buy off the shelf. The fifth and highest rung is ecosystem ownership: the retailer owns the system that generates future value—the finance, services, real estate, and adjacent businesses that surround the customer. Figure 1 depicts the Ladder. No retailer needs to reach the top rung to endure, and few climb every rung in sequence. What matters is the direction of travel.

Figure 1. The Enduring Ladder

The Enduring Ladder is not a prescription for how retailers should compete. It is not an argument for private labels over franchises, brands over destinations, or ownership over partnerships. The Gulf itself provides ample evidence that enduring success can emerge from many different strategic choices. Instead, the framework describes a direction of travel: the most resilient retailers use one stage of growth to finance the next stage of ownership, steadily increasing control over the assets that shape their future. Some climb by building brands. Others climb through customer relationships, private labels, digital channels, destinations, exclusive agencies, ecosystems, or data. The route varies. The principle remains remarkably consistent.

Seen through this lens, the distinction between growth and endurance becomes clearer. Growth increases scale. Ownership increases control. When consumer behavior shifts or competitive dynamics evolve, retailers that control more of the assets underpinning their business possess more options: they can adapt, reposition, invest, and respond. Retailers that depend heavily on assets controlled by others often find that their future is shaped by decisions made elsewhere.

Cenomi’s experience offers the cautionary illustration—and the numbers make it concrete. At its peak, the company operated more than 1,800 stores across thirteen countries, holding franchise rights to roughly ninety international brands, among the largest such portfolios anywhere in retail. Almost none of that value belonged to it. When conditions shifted, the exposure became visible with brutal speed: a net loss of SAR 1.1 billion in 2023, liabilities exceeding assets by SAR 3 billion, and a restructuring that closed more than 550 stores in a single year while cutting the portfolio toward thirteen “champion” brands. The issue was not execution, and it was not opportunity—Saudi consumers kept spending throughout. The issue was that too much of the value on which the business depended remained outside its control. The ending carries an irony no novelist would risk: in July 2025, the retailer that had rented the most and owned the least was rescued by Al-Futtaim—the family that had spent seven decades owning the most—which acquired a 49.95 percent stake for SAR 2.52 billion and extended a further SAR 1.35 billion shareholder loan. The Enduring Ladder had, in the end, collected its due.

Figure 2 maps how the eight retailers climbed the Enduring Ladder. Their destinations were different. Their paths often appeared contradictory. Yet once the pattern becomes visible, many of the apparent contradictions that define Gulf retail begin to dissolve. What looked like eight different success stories starts to resemble eight variations of the same underlying journey.

Figure 2. How Eight Gulf Retailers Climbed the Enduring Ladder

How Retailers Climb

If the Enduring Ladder explains where enduring advantage comes from, it raises an equally important question. How do retailers actually climb it?

None of the eight retailers began with the assets that later made them resilient. Landmark did not start with a portfolio of proprietary brands. Lulu did not begin with private labels or food-processing facilities. Majid Al Futtaim did not inherit destination malls. Looking backward, success appears inevitable—as if those assets were part of a master plan from the beginning. The reality is usually far messier. Most enduring advantages begin as small experiments, local insights, or pragmatic responses to immediate challenges. Consider Lulu’s early years: serving an overlooked customer required better sourcing; better sourcing required stronger supplier relationships; greater scale justified logistics; logistics created opportunities for private labels. A series of practical decisions accumulated into a formidable competitive position, one capability at a time.

Retailers do not climb the Enduring Ladder through a single breakthrough decision. They climb through a set of recurring disciplines that shape how opportunities are recognized, how resources are allocated, and how success is reinvested. The five disciplines that follow emerged repeatedly across the eight retailers. They are not steps to be followed in sequence, nor are they unique to the Gulf. What unites them is their contribution to a common outcome: increasing control over the assets that will matter most in the future.

The first discipline begins not with products, formats, or technology, but with something much simpler and far more powerful—the ability to see a customer that others overlook.

Discipline 1: Read the Customer Before the Category

Retail history is filled with companies that became obsessed with categories. Categories are visible. They fit neatly into strategic plans and investor presentations. Customers are often messier.

The most enduring retailers in the Gulf began somewhere else. They started with a customer.

When Yusuff Ali arrived in Abu Dhabi in the early 1970s, thousands of workers from South Asia were arriving to build the roads, ports, and cities that would reshape the region. Most retailers saw population growth. Yusuff Ali saw people. These workers wanted more than food. They wanted familiarity—the products, flavors, and brands that connected them to home. What appeared to be a niche segment was in fact becoming one of the largest consumer groups in the region. Lulu’s eventual success was not built on a superior retail format; hypermarkets existed elsewhere. The breakthrough came from understanding a customer before deciding on a format. Five decades later, that insight commands a 13.5 percent share of the GCC’s modern offline grocery market—the largest of any retailer in the region.

The same pattern recurs. Landmark’s success was never simply about opening stores; it was about understanding the aspirations of a rapidly expanding middle class seeking affordable fashion and family-oriented retail. Majid Al Futtaim recognized that Gulf consumers were looking for destinations rather than merely transactions. Xcite understood that customers buying electronics increasingly valued advice, service, financing, and convenience as much as the products themselves.

The distinction has profound consequences. Categories attract competitors because everyone can see them. Customers create opportunities because most people see them differently. And the discipline matters most during periods of change: categories reflect the present; customers frequently reveal the future. Seen through the lens of the Enduring Ladder, customer insight is far more than a marketing capability. It is often the first step toward ownership—the foundation on which proprietary products, private labels, loyalty programs, and experiences can later be built. The retailers that endure are often the ones that see people before they see products.

Discipline 2: Own Something That Outlasts the Transaction

Retailers spend enormous amounts of time thinking about transactions—basket sizes, conversion rates, footfall, sales per square foot. These metrics matter because transactions pay the bills. Yet the most successful retailers are often building something far more durable than the transaction itself.

Few companies illustrate this better than Majid Al Futtaim. When it began developing malls across the Gulf, it was easy to view them as real estate projects: retailers rented space, consumers visited, landlords collected rent. Majid Al Futtaim came to see the opportunity differently. Its ambition was not merely to build places where retail happened but to create destinations that people actively chose to visit. That distinction changed everything. A retailer depends on customers making a purchase. A destination depends on customers making a visit. Ski Dubai brought snow to the desert; entertainment venues, cinemas, restaurants, and carefully curated tenant mixes transformed malls into social infrastructure. Stores came and went. Brands entered and exited. Yet the destination retained its relevance because the underlying relationship was no longer tied to a specific transaction.

The same principle appears elsewhere. Al-Futtaim’s relationship with Toyota was never simply about selling cars; financing, insurance, and servicing made the vehicle sale the beginning of a much longer customer journey. Xcite, in a brutally competitive category, steadily strengthened the services, financing options, and omnichannel capabilities surrounding the products it sold—creating reasons for customers to return.

What unites these examples is a shift in managerial thinking. Instead of asking, "How do we maximize today’s sale?" the retailer begins asking, "What asset are we building through today’s sale?" A retailer focused exclusively on transactions becomes trapped in a cycle of promotions and short-term performance pressures. A retailer focused on enduring assets uses each transaction to strengthen something that persists beyond the sale—a destination, a service ecosystem, a proprietary brand, a trusted reputation. Transactions are fleeting. Assets accumulate. The enduring retailers were not simply selling products. They were building assets that outlived the products they sold.

Discipline 3: Own the Customer Relationship Before Someone Else Does

For much of retail history, location was the primary gateway to the customer. The retailer that secured the best site often secured the customer. The digital age changed that equation. Today, the most valuable real estate in retail is often invisible: a smartphone screen, a loyalty program, a customer database. The battle is no longer simply for footfall. It is increasingly for access.

Here I can write from direct experience, because I led Xcite through this shift. Consumer electronics is one of retail’s most unforgiving categories: the products that attract customers are owned by global manufacturers, product cycles are short, price comparisons are one click away. At first glance, it is a category in which the retailer controls almost nothing. Our insight—arrived at through necessity more than foresight—was that while we could never own Apple, Samsung, or Sony, we could own everything surrounding their products. We invested in omnichannel capabilities, consumer financing, delivery, installation, after-sales care, and loyalty—making Xcite the place where customers bought, financed, serviced, and upgraded their electronics. We shifted the basis of competition from products every retailer could access to relationships that were uniquely ours. I did not think of it as climbing a ladder at the time. Looking back, that is exactly what it was.

The pattern extends across the study. Landmark recognized early that digital channels would become vehicles for deepening customer relationships across brands and categories. Lulu invested heavily in digital capabilities to strengthen its connection with customers whose expectations were changing rapidly. Even Majid Al Futtaim used digital platforms to extend the customer experience beyond the mall visit.

Many of these investments were made long before their full value became apparent. Yet the enduring retailers viewed them differently. They were not investing in technology. They were investing in ownership. Every digital interaction created data. Every loyalty program strengthened a relationship. Every direct connection reduced dependence on intermediaries. Companies that controlled customer relationships gained insights, flexibility, and strategic options unavailable to those that depended on third parties—while companies that surrendered those relationships found themselves competing on price while someone else owned the customer.

This is why the most enduring retailers rarely view digital transformation as a technology project. They view it as a customer ownership project. Technology changes quickly. Customer relationships compound slowly. The retailers that endure understand the difference.

Discipline 4: Create Assets That Competitors Cannot Buy

Enduring advantage rarely comes from selling the same products as everyone else. Over time, the most successful retailers find ways to create assets that competitors cannot simply purchase, replicate, or negotiate away.

Landmark’s evolution offers one of the clearest examples. When Micky Jagtiani opened his first store in Bahrain, the obvious route to growth would have been to represent more global brands and expand the franchise model. Many retailers followed precisely that path. Landmark chose a different journey. As the business expanded, it steadily invested in creating brands of its own. Max, Splash, Babyshop, Home Centre, Home Box, Centrepoint, and others gradually became more than store names. They became assets with distinct identities, loyal customers, and market positions that competitors could not easily duplicate. The company was no longer merely distributing products. It was creating intellectual property.

The significance of that shift is easy to underestimate. A retailer selling someone else’s brand can generate impressive revenue, but much of the value ultimately accrues to the brand owner. A proprietary brand changes that equation, allowing the retailer to shape the customer proposition, control the product roadmap, and retain a greater share of the value it creates.

Apparel Group’s recent evolution reflects a similar logic: having built one of the region’s most successful businesses through partnerships with international brands, it increasingly developed assets it controlled more directly—not to abandon partnerships, but to complement them with propositions that could generate value independent of any single franchise relationship. The lesson is often misunderstood: the objective is not ownership for its own sake. Those assets may take the form of brands, private labels, exclusive products, customer data, proprietary services, or ecosystems. What matters is not the form but the growing ability to create value that competitors cannot easily access. Lulu’s private labels serve this purpose. So does Al-Futtaim’s automotive ecosystem. So, in its way, does a destination like Mall of the Emirates.

The shift becomes increasingly important as markets mature. In the early stages of growth, retailers can prosper simply by bringing products, brands, or formats to underserved markets. As competition intensifies, access becomes less valuable because more competitors gain it. What remains valuable is ownership. Perhaps that is why so many enduring retailers eventually become known for something uniquely their own—recognized for assets that competitors cannot buy off the shelf.

Discipline 5: Build Ahead of the Market

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the Gulf’s most successful retailers is their willingness to build capabilities long before demand appears sufficient to justify them.

Conventional business logic encourages caution: wait for demand to become visible before committing significant resources. That approach often works in stable markets. The Gulf has rarely been a stable market. Over five decades it has been transformed repeatedly by economic growth, demographic shifts, urbanization, tourism, technology, and national development programs of extraordinary ambition. The retailers that endured were often those that recognized these shifts before they became obvious.

Al-Futtaim could have remained a successful automotive distributor; for many businesses, exclusive rights to represent Toyota would have been more than sufficient. Yet it invested far beyond the immediate needs of the automotive business—into financial services, insurance, real estate, and customer ecosystems positioned to benefit from the broader evolution of Gulf economies.

Alshaya, long before digital transformation became a boardroom obsession, was investing in operational capabilities, customer engagement platforms, and strategic retail locations that strengthened its position across markets. Majid Al Futtaim’s world-class malls and leisure experiences required a belief that Gulf consumers would eventually seek far more than transactional retail—a belief that proved correct but was far from obvious when the investments were made.

The pattern extends beyond individual companies. The Gulf’s most successful retailers consistently aligned themselves with powerful long-term trends—the rise of expatriate populations, the emergence of a confident middle class, the growing role of women in the workforce, the expansion of tourism—and invested ahead of those trends rather than waiting for them to mature. By the time a trend becomes obvious, competitors have usually arrived.

The discipline is not about prediction. Retail history is littered with failed predictions, and the enduring retailers were rarely perfect forecasters. What distinguished them was their willingness to translate conviction into capability. Seen through the lens of the Enduring Ladder, building ahead of the market is ultimately an ownership decision: every major investment is a choice about which future assets a retailer wishes to control.

Taken together, the five disciplines explain how retailers climb. They do not, however, answer an important objection. Perhaps these retailers succeeded not because of superior discipline, but because they operated in one of the world’s wealthiest regions. Perhaps the real story is oil, not ownership. That argument deserves serious consideration.

Figure 3. The Five Disciplines of Enduring Retailers

Looking Beyond Oil

At first glance, the stories in this article appear to have an obvious explanation. The Gulf became wealthy because of oil. Rising incomes created consumers. Expanding populations created demand. In such an environment, perhaps this success should not surprise us.

There is some truth in that view. Oil revenues financed infrastructure, accelerated urbanization, attracted millions of expatriate workers, and created one of the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets. Every retailer in this study benefited, directly or indirectly, from those tailwinds.

Yet the more closely one examines the evidence, the harder it becomes to accept oil as a complete explanation. Oil created opportunity. It did not determine how that opportunity would be used. If resource wealth alone were sufficient to create enduring retailers, every major retail company operating in the Gulf should have prospered. The reality was very different. Some retailers emerged stronger with every decade. Others struggled to adapt. A few disappeared altogether. The same economic environment produced remarkably different outcomes.

Cenomi is the proof. It operated in the largest economy in the GCC, in a retail market growing throughout its crisis, representing many of the world’s most recognized brands. If favorable conditions were the primary determinant of success, it should have remained formidable indefinitely. Market growth could not compensate for the absence of assets that provided control over the future.

The contrast with Landmark, Lulu, Majid Al Futtaim, Al-Futtaim, and Xcite is revealing. These companies also benefited from the Gulf’s transformation, yet they consistently used periods of growth to build capabilities that would remain valuable long after the growth itself had been absorbed. Growth became a means rather than an end. Viewed through this lens, oil begins to look less like an explanation and more like a backdrop. The true achievement of the Gulf’s leading retailers was not that they succeeded during a period of extraordinary expansion—many businesses managed that. It was that they used periods of abundance to prepare for a future in which abundance alone would no longer be enough.

External conditions matter. They always do. But enduring advantage is rarely inherited from the environment. It is built through the choices organizations make while operating within it. The Gulf provided the opportunity. What distinguished the region’s most successful retailers was what they chose to do with it.

What This Means for Retailers Entering the Gulf

For retailers looking at the Gulf today, the most obvious attraction is its growth. The region combines favorable demographics, rising consumer expectations, ambitious national transformation programs, and some of the highest levels of retail spending anywhere in the world. From Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to the continued evolution of the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, the opportunities are substantial.

Yet the experiences of the eight retailers examined in this study suggest that growth alone is the wrong place to focus. Many companies entering the Gulf begin by asking how large the opportunity is. The more successful ones ask a different question: what assets can we build while pursuing that opportunity? The distinction may appear subtle, but it often separates businesses that enjoy temporary success from those that create enduring advantage.

That lesson is particularly relevant because the Gulf is entering a new phase of development. In earlier decades, access itself created advantage—access to consumers, to brands, to modern retail formats, to capital was often sufficient to build a successful business. Today, those advantages are increasingly available to many competitors. As markets mature, the source of differentiation shifts from access to ownership. The critical question is no longer what a retailer can sell in the Gulf, but what it can build in the Gulf.

Retailers entering the region would therefore do well to think beyond store openings, revenue targets, and market share. They should ask how their presence in the Gulf can strengthen customer relationships, develop proprietary capabilities, build brands, create ecosystems, deepen localization, and establish assets that competitors will struggle to replicate. The companies that thrive over the next twenty years are unlikely to be those that merely participate in the region’s growth. They will be those that use that growth to create enduring sources of advantage.

Conclusion: The Next Chapter of the Gulf Retail Story

In 1973, a young man in Bahrain inherited $6,000 and a franchise agreement that his late brother had never lived to use. In the same year, a teenager from Kerala arrived in Abu Dhabi to help in a small family trading business serving expatriate workers. A few years later, a young Kuwaiti entrepreneur began building a retail business around brands he would never own. At the time, there was little reason to believe these journeys would one day help define the retail landscape of an entire region.

Over the following five decades, they and their peers became participants in one of the most remarkable retail transformations of the modern era. They pursued different strategies, served different customers, and built very different organizations. There was no single formula for success. What emerged instead was a deeper pattern: the most enduring retailers consistently used one stage of growth to strengthen the foundations for the next, steadily increasing their ownership of the factors that would shape their future competitiveness. Enduring advantage, their stories suggest, is rarely the product of a single strategic decision. It is the cumulative result of thousands of decisions about what to build, what to own, and where to invest.

That lesson is particularly relevant today, as the Gulf enters a new chapter in its retail evolution. International brands are abundant. Capital is available. Consumers are sophisticated. Digital adoption is among the highest in the world. The question facing retailers is no longer whether the Gulf offers growth. It is how that growth can be converted into an enduring advantage.

As a new generation of retailers looks toward what may be the world’s next great retail frontier, the challenge is not merely to participate in the Gulf’s growth story. It is to build something that will endure when the next chapter of that story is written. The retailers that succeed will likely be those that understand a lesson their predecessors learned many years ago: growth creates opportunity, but ownership creates endurance.

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