Most people value a holding company by adding up the businesses it owns. That sum is the balance sheet. It is not the engine. The engine is the rate and the cost at which capital moves between those businesses. A holding company is, at its heart, a machine for allocating capital — and its returns come less from any single asset than from the discipline of the cycle it runs.
It helps to start with a simple truth that is easy to say and hard to live by. Every dirham of capital has a price before it earns anything — its cost of capital. Value is created only in the gap between what that capital goes on to earn and what it cost to put to work. Widen that gap, repeat it, and you compound. Ignore it, and even a growing company can quietly destroy value while its revenue line climbs. A great allocator is not the one who deploys the most capital. It is the one who most reliably earns a return above its cost, and then does it again.
Capital has a price before it has a return. The disciplined investor never forgets which comes first.
That repetition is the flywheel. Recurring cash from our mature businesses — the roughly AED 17.7 billion in adjusted operating earnings the group generated in 2025 — funds the next generation of platforms. We build and scale them. And when a business becomes worth more to the public market than it is to us as a private owner, we monetise a measured part of it and send that capital back to the top of the wheel. When we listed a portion of NMDC Energy, we raised meaningful proceeds while keeping control; when we exited Modon, we did so at a strong return. Neither was ‘getting out’. Both were refuelling. The faster and more disciplined that loop, the more times a year the same base of capital earns its spread — and capital velocity, not asset count, is what compounds.
Fadi Sleiman
Group Chief Financial Officer
Here is the part most balance-sheet readers miss: the spread has two sides, and the quieter side is the more durable one. Earning more is hard and fiercely contested. Paying less for capital is a lasting structural edge. That is the real reason we hold a large liquidity buffer and cap net leverage below three times earnings — not caution for its own sake, but to keep our cost of capital low and our access to it continuous. A low cost of capital does two things at once: it lets more opportunities clear their hurdle, and it means that when a cycle turns, we are the buyer rather than the forced seller. Managed this way, liquidity is not idle money. It is strategic optionality with a price tag we are willing to pay.
And this is where governance stops being a slide in a deck and becomes a line in the financing cost. The cheapest capital in any market flows to the institutions that market trusts the most. That is the financial logic — not the public-relations one — behind our insistence on strong governance and independent validation: an AA ESG rating at NMDC Group, held now for a second consecutive year; an A rating at Aldar, whose debt has priced at among its tightest-ever spreads. A tighter spread is not an accolade. It is a lower cost of capital, which is a wider flywheel, which is more compounding. Trust, in this sense, is a balance-sheet asset.
Discipline also means knowing when not to turn the wheel. Capital forced to deploy below its cost destroys value as surely as a bad acquisition. So having built the base, we also began returning capital through our first dividend and a share buyback. Returning capital is not the opposite of growth; it is the honest admission that we will not chase growth beneath its hurdle rate. And when an opportunity genuinely clears that hurdle, we reach for it — as with our cornerstone commitment to the Alpha Wave Ventures II fund, a measured, fund-structured window onto the technology frontier, where Alpha Wave backs companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic and Cerebras. Same wheel; longer reach.
So the next time you weigh any holding company, look past the roster of assets and ask three questions. What does its capital cost? How wide is the spread it earns above that cost? And how many times a year can it complete the cycle? Those three answers will tell you more about future value than any trophy asset ever will. Ours is a patient answer: keep the cost of capital low, keep the spread honest, and keep the wheel turning through every part of the cycle. That is how patient capital compounds — quietly for a long time, and then all at once.