The Mall Is Not the Point. The Footfall Is.

Retail is the least glamorous dataset in the Gulf and the most honest. Sovereign announcements describe intent. A supermarket basket describes behaviour. When you want to know whether a diversification programme is reaching households rather than balance sheets, the till is where you look.

On that measure, 2025 closed well and 2026 is holding.

What the operators reported

Majid Al Futtaim, which runs a large share of the region's malls, hypermarkets, cinemas and leisure assets, posted full year 2025 revenue of $9.8 billion, up 6 per cent, EBITDA of $1.4 billion and net profit of $1.0 billion, a 41 per cent increase, alongside free cash flow of $0.9 billion and a $0.5 billion reduction in net debt.

The composition is the interesting part. Revenue grew mid single digit while profit grew more than forty per cent. That gap is operational rather than cyclical: better mix, tighter cost, less debt service. A consumer business improving margin while deleveraging is a business that expects the demand to persist.

In Saudi Arabia, the General Authority for Statistics recorded wholesale and retail trade revenue up 3.2 per cent year on year, with e-commerce a visible contributor. That is steady growth in a market where a large share of the population is young, urbanising and moving spend online at the same time.

Retail is a population statistic in disguise

The Gulf consumer economy is unusual because its customer base is not fixed. In most markets, retail growth comes from existing residents spending more. In Dubai, Riyadh and Doha, a meaningful part of it comes from more people being present, whether as residents or as the 19.59 million international overnight visitors Dubai counted in 2025.

That is why the retail line moves with the same variables we track everywhere else on this desk. Residency instruments determine how many households form. The events calendar determines footfall by week. Company formation determines how many salaries are paid locally. We set out that last mechanism in the Saudi company formation guide.

The three consumers a brand is actually serving

First, the long term resident household, which behaves like any developed market consumer and responds to schooling costs, rents and rates. Second, the newly arrived professional, who spends heavily in the first twelve months on setup and then normalises. Third, the visitor, whose basket is concentrated in luxury, food service and experience.

Most retail analysis in the region blends the three and then wonders why the forecast missed. They have different cycles, different price sensitivities and different channel preferences. The operators who report best results are the ones running distinct propositions for each.

Where the growth goes next

Three directions worth watching. E-commerce penetration in Saudi Arabia, where logistics build-out is still ahead of consumer habit and has room to close. Grocery and value formats, which grow with population rather than with sentiment. And experiential retail attached to the events and destination programmes, which is the segment most directly exposed to the tourism figures set out in our Gulf tourism explainer.

None of this is a consumer boom story. It is something more durable: a region adding customers structurally rather than borrowing demand forward, which is the only kind of retail growth worth underwriting.