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With 97% of surveyed Kuwait CEOs expecting deal value outside their core industries, the diversified family-business model offers a useful preview of the next acquisition cycle.
Kuwait’s next acquisition wave may be about buying capabilities, not scale. In PwC’s February 2026 Kuwait CEO survey, 92% of chief executives said they planned at least one acquisition worth more than 10% of their company’s assets over the following three years. More strikingly, 97% expected deal value to come from sectors outside their core business, while 61% had already expanded into new industries during the previous five years, against 39% across the Middle East.
That does not turn Kuwait’s traditional family conglomerate into a newly invented corporate strategy. Merchant houses were diversifying across agencies, trading businesses and successive generations of opportunity long before today’s language of capability acquisition arrived. What has changed is the direction of travel elsewhere. Companies are now proposing, through deliberate M&A, to build some of the breadth that established family groups accumulated over decades.
Reinvention enters the deal room
The regional market gives that ambition room to move. EY counted 390 MENA deals worth $46.7 billion in the first half of 2026. Domestic deal value exceeded $16 billion between March and June, more than four times the corresponding 2025 figure, while regional investors completed 119 outbound transactions worth $25.5 billion across areas including technology, transportation, financial services and energy-related sectors.
Kuwaiti CEOs are pointing in a similar direction. Their leading expansion targets in PwC’s survey were technology, media and telecoms at 44%, financial services at 39% and consumer markets at 36%. Khalid Al Shatti, PwC Middle East’s Kuwait Country Senior Partner, said in the survey published on 22 February: “CEOs in Kuwait are investing, transforming and scaling today, using confidence, capability and collaboration to turn near-term uncertainty into long-term advantage.”
The distinction is important. Expansion outside the core is not simply about owning unrelated assets. PwC says Kuwait’s CEOs are pursuing large deals to build capabilities, enter adjacent sectors and access new markets. Diversification is the structure. Reinvention is the objective.
A 1949 structure meets a 2026 strategy
Al Ameeri Group Holding fits inside that story precisely because it reached the structure by a different route. The Kuwait family group says it was established in 1949 and now operates across marine and land products, food and beverages, fashion retail, real estate and military services, alongside navigation, electronics, transportation and shipping.
Its businesses also cross customer types. The group’s commercial and government operation says it is pre-qualified for public and military tenders and supplies entities including the ministries of Defence, Interior, Health and Electricity and Water. Elsewhere, the portfolio reaches consumers through boats, navigation products, restaurants and fashion.
Al Ameeri therefore should not be read as evidence that the merchant-house model and today’s capability-led acquisition strategy are identical. It is more useful as evidence of the organisational destination: multiple sectors under one parent, exposure to different demand cycles and relationships spanning consumer, corporate and government markets.
When a portfolio can travel
Its marine activities show how that platform can extend geographically. In February 2025, Azimut expanded Elite Yachts’ exclusive dealership into Saudi Arabia, extending a Gulf relationship operated through an Al Ameeri subsidiary. Azimut said its Middle East turnover was up 25% year on year at the time.
By December, Ahmad Al Ameeri was speaking about the regional problem in broader terms. “The real challenge is to create easy cruising from country to country,” the group CEO said at the Gulf Superyacht Summit, according to Maritime Observer’s 14 December 2025 account. The comment concerned yachting regulation and itineraries, but it also captures the commercial logic behind operating across the Gulf: value increases when individual national markets can be connected.
The parent operates at the same time in a very different asset class. Al Ameeri’s Dynamic Project Company manages the Marina Waves complex within Marina World, including tenant selection and third-party contract management. The relevance is not that yacht distribution and property management naturally belong together. It is that the holding structure has been built to contain businesses that do not.
The test comes after the deal
There is one limit to what this example can establish. Al Ameeri is privately held and does not publish audited consolidated revenue, segment profitability or returns on invested capital, so the public record can demonstrate diversification as an organisational model, not prove that each part of the portfolio produces superior financial returns.
That is also the test facing Kuwait’s next generation of acquirers. Crossing an industry boundary is easier than proving the parent company adds more than capital once the transaction closes. Yet the strategic direction is unusually clear. When 97% of surveyed Kuwait CEOs expect deal value to come from outside their core industries, the diversified family group is no longer merely a historical feature of the country’s merchant economy. It offers a preview of the management challenge much of corporate Kuwait is now choosing for itself.
