GCC Equity Markets Reach $4T as Debt Hits $1.2T
Saudi Arabia's exchange holds 63% of regional market value while most dollar sukuk list abroad, Fitch Ratings says.
Tariq Benali Tariq Benali covers business and corporate news across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted, tracking the deals, leadership moves and regulatory shifts behind the region's companies. tariq@anecdoted.com
Equity markets across the six Gulf states reached roughly $4 trillion in September, while outstanding debt securities in the region stood at $1.2 trillion at the end of the first half of the year. Islamic instruments accounted for about 42% of that debt.
The equity picture is concentrated. The Saudi Exchange remained the largest market in the region in September, with about 63% of total GCC capitalization. Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange held 18%, Dubai Financial Market 7%. Inside the Saudi Exchange, a single company, Saudi Aramco, made up roughly 65% of the bourse's value as of August. Five issuers account for around 60% of ADX's capitalization. Fitch Ratings, which compiled the data, flagged that concentration as one of the main constraints on the region's markets.
Dollar sukuk list mostly abroad
Debt listings behave differently from equity listings. Equity trading is largely domestic; hard-currency sukuk and bonds are not. At the end of the first half of 2026, the London Stock Exchange listed more than half of all outstanding US dollar sukuk globally, and 95% of those instruments originated in the Middle East, chiefly from GCC issuers.
Nasdaq Dubai is the regional exception. The exchange carried more than 28% of global outstanding hard-currency sukuk at the end of the first half of 2026. Total listed debt there exceeded $140 billion, with sukuk accounting for roughly 70% of it. Bashar Al Natoor, Fitch's managing director and global head of Islamic Finance, gave the figures on the sidelines of the Arab Federation of Capital Markets Annual Conference in Abu Dhabi.
Saudi Arabia's domestic curve
Saudi Arabia has built a deeper local-currency debt market than its neighbors. Riyal-denominated sovereign sukuk issuance reflects government work on a domestic yield curve. Every listed local-currency instrument is structured as sukuk, a design that matches the mandates of Islamic banks, which hold most banking system assets in the kingdom.
Foreign participation is rising. Overseas buyers took 15% of primary sovereign issuance in the first half of 2026, against 12% for 2025 and 8% in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That growth came despite volatility tied to the Iran war. Saudi riyal government sukuk enter the JPMorgan Government Bond Index for Emerging Markets in 2027, a step expected to draw more international capital.
What holds the region back
Al Natoor said development has been uneven across countries, reflecting differences in economic scale and strategic priorities. Fitch's report pointed to narrow product ranges, trading volumes below those of developed and large emerging markets, and a fragmented market structure.
The deepest brake is corporate habit. Gulf companies still fund themselves mainly through banks rather than capital markets. That reliance slows domestic debt market growth and makes it harder to build the secondary liquidity and issuer diversity investors need before treating these markets as core allocations.
Al Natoor pointed to derivatives, exchange-traded funds and, eventually, asset tokenization as the product categories most likely to deepen GCC capital markets. Tokenization remains early, with room to develop over the medium and long term.
