The Company continues its evolution from a regional champion to a global food enterprise, guided by disciplined oversight, strategic investment, and a long-term vision to strengthen resilience and sustainable value creation.
Growing Within, Expanding Beyond.
Almarai’s evolution from a pioneering regional champion to a global food enterprise continued in 2025, shaped by disciplined governance, long-term investment, and an unwavering commitment to quality, reliability, and scale with responsibility. Throughout this period of growth and structural change, the Board remained focused on its role of stewardship and guidance, ensuring Almarai remains resilient, relevant, and well-governed. It is through this long-horizon lens that we reflect on the year in review, evaluating performance, risk, and governance in support of long-term value creation.
Almarai operates at a scale that carries national importance, supporting food security, creating employment, investing in domestic production, and contributing to the resilience of regional food supply chains. With this scale comes a greater responsibility for stronger systems, deeper oversight, and robust governance. The Board’s governance role is to ensure this growth remains disciplined, that risks are anticipated and effectively managed, and that strategic decisions are made with durability in mind. This perspective has guided our oversight of capital allocation, leadership transitions, risk management, sustainability priorities, and stakeholder relationships throughout 2025.
From a Board standpoint, 2025 was a year of consolidation and structural strengthening. Almarai continued to perform resiliently while advancing one of the most ambitious investment programs in its history. These investments across production, logistics, digital infrastructure, and new categories are designed to support near-term scale, while also building long-term capabilities that will support Almarai’s competitiveness for decades to come. The Board remained closely engaged with management throughout the year, ensuring that growth remained anchored in strategic clarity, operational discipline, and financial prudence.
Governance Evolution and Institutional Maturity
The Board continued to enhance Almarai’s governance framework during 2025 to reflect its scale, geographic reach, and portfolio complexity.
Board terms were extended from three to four years in order to strengthen continuity, deepen institutional knowledge, and enhance long-term oversight. Following the Extraordinary General Assembly held in June 2025, shareholders elected the Board of Directors for a new four-year term, and I was honored to be reappointed as Chairman. We also refreshed our Board composition to ensure an appropriate balance between continuity and fresh perspectives. Board committees continued to play a central role in strengthening oversight across key areas, with the Audit Committee constituted for the new term in 2025, and its membership and mandate approved by the Board.
Integrated Reporting: A Governance Perspective
This year marks Almarai’s transition to integrated reporting. Integrated reporting reflects how the Board understands value creation: as a function of financial performance, operational discipline, risk management, governance, and sustainability operating together, rather than in isolation. This Report demonstrates how our decisions about capital allocation influence environmental outcomes, how our technology investments reshape risk profiles, and how our people strategies determine long-term productivity. The Board believes that presenting this interconnected view of the business strengthens transparency, accountability, and long-term trust with our shareholders.
Risk, Resilience, and Long-Term Protection
Throughout 2025, the Board continued to strengthen its oversight of enterprise-wide risks, including biosecurity, food safety, cyber resilience, climate exposure, water security, and supply chain continuity. These are structural realities for a company operating at Almarai’s scale, and what differentiates Almarai is the discipline with which risk is governed. The Board regularly reviews exposures, stress-tests assumptions, and ensures that controls evolve alongside growth. This discipline is central to protecting shareholder capital and preserving long-term competitiveness.
Strategy Through a Board Lens
The Board remained deeply engaged with management in 2025 as Almarai continued its investment cycle and entered a critical phase of strategic execution. Almarai’s strategy focuses in equal measure on strengthening core categories comprising dairy, poultry, bakery and juice, while selectively expanding into adjacencies such as ice cream, seafood and red meat, enhancing relevance and portfolio diversity. This approach was reinforced during the year through the acquisition of Pure Beverages Industry Company, marking Almarai’s entry into the bottled water segment through an established business with leading brands and nationwide production capabilities.
While strengthening traditional and modern trade channels, Almarai is also outpacing market growth across channels that are reshaping the sector, notably foodservice and e-commerce. Almarai brands continued to extend their market leadership across the GCC, while expanding coverage in prioritized MENA markets, and seeding strategic export destinations for future growth. This approach allows Almarai to evolve with changing consumer needs and avoid overconcentration in an increasingly contested market place, while also future-proofing margins through operational efficiencies and disciplined capital deployment.
As one of the region’s largest food and beverage producers, Almarai also plays a crucial role in national food security and economic development. The Board recognizes that strategic investments in poultry, dairy, water, and logistics extend beyond commercial returns; They are contributions to the Kingdom’s economic transformation plans, and its Vision 2030 food security objectives. In a time of global supply volatility, reliable local production has become increasingly critical to the Kingdom’s economic resilience. This national role also informs how Almarai approaches sustainability, employment, supplier development, and long-term capability building as integral aspects to an enduring performance.
Sustainability as a License to Operate
As Almarai prepares to launch its 2026–2030 sustainability strategy cycle, the Board fully supports the continued focus on the three core sustainability pillars: Caring for People, Protecting the Planet, and Producing Responsible Products. This next phase will place greater emphasis on environmental resilience as a foundation for Almarai’s operational stability, regulatory readiness, and long-term cost discipline.
This perspective is reflected in the scale and direction of Almarai’s actions during the reporting year, as we advanced major investments aligned with national food security priorities, including the expansion of our poultry operations in the Hail region, which will materially increase domestic production capacity. We deepened our environmental stewardship by building a comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions database, adopting science-based targets, and deploying advanced AI and IoT solutions to improve industrial efficiencies. Our commitment to people and communities continued through expanded national talent development programs, partnerships with universities, and targeted health and social initiatives. Financial discipline remained central throughout, evidenced by the successful USD 500 million international sukuk issuance during the reporting period.
Recognition for Excellence
During 2025, Almarai received several local and international awards across corporate governance, social responsibility, industrial innovation, and brand valuation categories.
For the second consecutive year, Almarai was recognized with the Corporate Governance Excellence Award, ranking among the top non-financial companies on Tadawul under the Corporate Governance Index. Almarai also received the Corporate Social Responsibility Award from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development for the second consecutive year, in addition to the Nationalization Award in recognition of its efforts to empower Saudi talent.
Almarai received the MODON Industrial Excellence Award in the Large Factories category for leadership in automation and operational efficiency. The Group also secured recognition at the Athar Saudi Festival of Creativity and the Dubai Lynx Awards, reflecting the growing sophistication of its brand storytelling and engagement.
Almarai was ranked the fourth most valuable dairy brand worldwide for the third consecutive year by Brand Finance, and was included among the Forbes Middle East Top 100 Listed Companies. These rankings highlight the global competitiveness of the brand.
Leadership Transition and Continuity
With strong foundations in place at the end of 2025 for Almarai’s next phase of growth, the Board appointed Mr. Fawaz Aljasser as Chief Executive Officer, effective 16 January 2026. Mr. Aljasser is a long-standing Almarai leader with nearly two decades of experience across the organization, most recently serving as Executive Vice President of the Bakery Division.
This appointment reflects the depth of leadership that Almarai has deliberately built over time, and a clear demonstration of the Group’s long-standing commitment to succession planning, leadership development, and continuity. We are confident that Mr. Aljasser’s deep institutional knowledge, operational experience, and strategic understanding will ensure continuity while driving the next phase of delivery.
Looking Ahead
As we look to the future, the Board remains confident in Almarai’s direction. The foundations remain strong: a diversified portfolio, disciplined capital allocation, robust governance, and a clear strategic roadmap. The years ahead will bring both opportunity and complexity, and our responsibility is to ensure that Almarai continues to grow with integrity, resilience, and clarity of purpose.
Acknowledgements
Our Board expresses profound gratitude to the Kingdom’s leadership, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Bin Abdulaziz, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, for their inspiring leadership and transformative vision for the Kingdom and its people. We also express our sincere appreciation to the government agencies for their continued support of our business and ongoing guidance as we take our Company to new heights.
The Board of Directors’ support during this important chapter of Almarai’s story has been invaluable, and I thank each of you for your loyalty. We are grateful for our shareholders’ unwavering confidence in Almarai, for our consumers, who have made Almarai their number one choice for quality food and beverages, and, of course, the Almarai team, which was yet again integral to our continued success.
The Board of Directors remain committed to stewarding this institution with care, discipline, and a long-term perspective, as we continue the next phase of our journey to even greater success.