Mohamed Alabbar to Businesses Navigating Uncertainty: ‘Don’t Be a Child’
Emaar’s founder points to post-ceasefire cancellations and urges companies to hold capital, avoid debt, and build for the long term.
Karim El-Sayed Karim El-Sayed covers company news, policy and regulation across the UAE and wider MENA for Anecdoted, with a focus on how new rules and licences reshape how startups operate. karim@anecdoted.com
Mohamed Alabbar has a blunt answer for companies navigating war, shifting demand, and uncertainty: don’t be a child. The Emaar Properties founder and managing director gave that advice during a fireside conversation at AIM 2026 titled The Tycoon in the Storm: How the World’s Most Consequential Capital Holders Navigate 2026.
Alabbar is candid about the context. There is a war in the region, he said. He then pointed to Emaar’s own numbers. In November 2025 the developer logged 700 unit cancellations while selling 2,500 units a month. In March 2026, when the war started, cancellations reached 1,100. After the ceasefire they fell to 150. He described the indications as really good for Emaar. Some developers are cutting prices by 15–20%. Emaar is not. He said Dubai and the UAE will grow even more after the crisis.
He refuses to call this moment abnormal. Alabbar sees no difference between the current conflict and the Ukraine war. History, he said, shows crises are constant; if you are intelligent, you accept that it is never stable. Each crisis lasts two to three years and then stops. The useful measure is not whether a shock arrives but whether a business can function through it.
At Emaar’s scale, the past cycle created unusual pressure. Alabbar described the previous years as crazy growth, margins, and profits. That run of success, he said, made it time to reorganize companies. He argued that growing 30–40% each year is too much. Businessmen should build for the long term because something will always be coming. His operating rules are plain: enough capital, no debt, good people, honesty with customers and society. Those rules apply every second of life, not just inside business quarters.
He put that local advice in a global frame. The US represents 40% of the global economy. Alabbar said he loves his Chinese friends because they compete with the US yet insist the US must be healthy. Stable leadership matters everywhere. The UAE’s leadership uses every crisis to check and improve, he said.
Alabbar’s guidance pushes the war out of the center of the story. The center is the balance sheet. Emaar’s path from 1,100 cancellations in March to 150 after the ceasefire shows how quickly buyers come back when the underlying structure holds.
The moderator at AIM 2026 asked whether investors are hesitant to enter the UAE and regional markets. Alabbar’s answer did not deny the nervousness. He shifted focus from timing to structure. Markets will keep producing shocks; the variable is whether a firm still carries enough capital, owes nothing, and holds people who can act in bad months. That, in his telling, is why Emaar can record 150 cancellations and still sound unworried.
