By Ameen Al Douseri, Chairman, ORMANA Investment Company
For twenty years, my job was to shape how Kuwait sounded to itself. As a radio producer at the Ministry of Information, I helped build the programmes that carried this country’s mornings and milestones, its setbacks and its celebrations, into homes and cars and majlises across the nation. Radio teaches you something that spreadsheets never will: that a country is not its GDP. A country is its story, told and retold until people believe in it enough to build something. And someone has to do the building, in the studio as much as in the market.
When I left broadcasting and turned to investment, I did not leave that lesson behind. I carried it with me into every decision ORMANA has made. And it is the same lesson I would offer to any investor across the Gulf weighing where to place their capital in the years ahead. Look past the noise, and listen for the story that has not yet been fully told. In this region, that story is Kuwait.
These are extraordinary years for the Gulf. Across our region, ambition is being matched by execution on a scale the world has noticed, and Kuwait is proud to stand among nations building their futures with such confidence. But amid all this momentum, there is a truth every seasoned investor eventually learns. The real returns often come from the things that are easy to overlook precisely because they cannot be photographed from a helicopter: trust, reputation, a name that people believe in, a market whose appetite has been quietly underestimated. The investor who learns to value those things is rarely the one following the crowd.
This is the heart of what I want to say to my fellow Gulf investors. The next chapter of value creation in this region will not be written in concrete alone. It will be written in brands. It will be written in names that consumers reach for instinctively, in companies that earn loyalty rather than rent it, in the intangible trust that takes years to build and cannot be bought at any auction. A producer knows this in his bones. You cannot fake what people choose to come back to. The most valuable thing in any market is not the asset you can see. It is the belief you can earn.
Kuwait is fertile ground for exactly this kind of patient, identity-driven investment. We have a sophisticated consumer base, a deep tradition of commerce that predates the oil itself, and a population that knows quality and rewards it. What we have sometimes lacked is conviction in our own ability to build things the region wants. That, I believe, is changing, and the investors who recognize it early will be glad they did.
I did not arrive at this view in the abstract. I have lived it. ORMANA began with beauty. We took the natural treasures of Morocco, we paired them with scientific expertise, and we built a luxury skincare brand, not in the established capitals of the industry, but here, out of Kuwait. We were told, gently, that luxury beauty was a game for others to play. We did not accept that. Today ORMANA, alongside the other names in our portfolio, stands as my own small proof of a larger argument: that a Kuwaiti company can create something premium, distinctive, and regionally competitive, and that the doubters were measuring the wrong things.
From that foundation we expanded into real estate and into construction and development, the harder and more capital-intensive work of literally building. The progression was deliberate. Once you have learned how to earn a customer’s trust in something as personal as what they put on their skin, you understand that the same principle governs a building, a neighbourhood, a development that families will live their lives inside. We do not chase the quick transaction. We look for long-term value, the kind that compounds quietly because it is built on quality and held with patience. This is not the fashionable way to invest. It is, I am convinced, the durable one.
To the entrepreneur in Riyadh, the family office in Doha, the investor in Manama or Abu Dhabi reading this: I am not asking you to take Kuwait on faith. I am asking you to do what I did, which is to look closely at what is actually here. Examine the consumer market. Examine the talent. Examine the appetite for homegrown brands that carry a story worth believing in. Then decide.
I spent two decades helping tell this country’s story to itself. I have spent the years since betting my own capital that the story was true. I have not been disappointed, and I do not expect to be.
The most rewarding opportunities are rarely the ones everyone is already chasing. Kuwait is quietly waiting for the investors wise enough to look closely, and to listen.
