AhlulBayt News Agency: Full-year net profits at the company fell nearly 40 per cent to $159mn last year, as consumers in the region rejected US-linked eateries and products over Washington’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza.
“[I] don’t blame them for their emotions,” said Americana’s chair and joint largest shareholder Mohamed Alabbar in a Financial Times interview.
He added that the boycott had pushed the company to cut costs as well as look for new local acquisition targets.
“When a situation like that happens, you have to make sure that you are efficient enough that you can sustain . . . we had to tighten the belt,” Alabbar said.
Americana’s concentration of western brands has made it vulnerable to consumer boycotts, though its major shareholders, which include Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, are not based in the US.
Alabbar, who also runs Dubai’s biggest property developer Emaar, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund have jointly owned a majority stake in Americana since 2016.
The company’s share price on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul market, the region’s biggest, is down 28 per cent over the past year.
Revenues of $1.22bn for the first six months of 2025 were up on the same period last year but slightly lower than those recorded two years ago, even though the company now has 361 more outlets than it did in mid-2023.
In response to the fall in sales, Alabbar said the group, which operates 2,638 restaurants, had “heavily” reduced purchasing costs rather than laying off staff, but “our margins suffered”.
He added that although the impact of the boycott had eased, Americana is still looking to diversify. The situation “strengthened our belief that we need to go and nurture and buy maybe some Middle Eastern brands and grow them”, he said.
“We are talking to a lot” of potential targets, he added. “We looked at some, we said no. We’re still searching and we’ll find one or two or three winners.”
Although he did not name specific companies, Alabbar said there were plenty of restaurants across the region that could be franchised and expanded.
“Kuwait has a lot of brands. Saudi, you’ve got beautiful stuff. UAE, Egypt [and] Lebanon.”
He added that low debt levels would allow the company to “raise capital for our expansion. This gives us enough room for the new M&A activity.”
The Middle East and north Africa’s fast-food market is worth about $33bn, according to data analytics company Euromonitor International, with average annual growth of nearly 9 per cent since 2020.
McDonald’s was among the fast-food chains that had been hit by the consumer boycott but said in February that its Middle East business had picked up again.
09:30 - 2025/10/18
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