Saudi bottler Naqi Water targets majority stake in Ahali Najd

Published: 2026-07-03T09:40:43.000Z

Naqi Water Company is making one of the more unexpected moves on the Saudi market this week. The bottled water producer, listed on the Saudi Exchange under the ticker 2282, has signed a memorandum to acquire a 70 per cent stake in Ahali Najd, a car rental business, according to a disclosure picked up by Reuters. Financial terms have not been made public, and as with any memorandum of this kind the transaction still has to clear due diligence and final agreements before it becomes binding, but the direction of travel is clear enough. A water company wants to own a majority of a vehicle hire firm. At first glance the pairing looks odd, though it makes more sense up close. Naqi was founded in 2014 in Unaizah in the Qassim region, where it draws groundwater from its own wells before treating and bottling it, and Ahali Najd operates out of Al Rass in the very same province, so this is a local company buying a neighbor it knows. Naqi's registered activities also already stretch beyond beverages into the land transport of goods, meaning fleets and logistics are hardly foreign territory. For a business that runs distribution across the Kingdom and exports to four neighboring countries, a rental and leasing arm offers both a new income stream and a degree of control over mobility costs. The company arrives at this deal in expansion mode. Naqi floated on the main market in 2022 at 69 riyals a share after its institutional book was covered more than thirty times, and it remains the only pure bottled water producer listed on the main board. More recently it has been building a new factory in Riyadh, upgrading the plan to two production lines with a combined capacity of 120,000 bottles an hour under a contract worth around 42 million riyals, with the financial impact expected from late this year. Adding a majority stake in a rental firm bolts a services business onto that manufacturing story. The regional context helps explain the appetite. Car rental and leasing has become one of the livelier corners of the Saudi market, propelled by tourism growth, business travel and the wider Vision 2030 push, and investors have rewarded it, with specialists such as Lumi Rental and Theeb Rent a Car trading on the exchange alongside Budget's local operator. Listed Saudi firms have also grown notably comfortable diversifying far outside their original lanes, snapping up businesses in adjacent or entirely separate sectors to spread risk. Naqi's move slots into both trends at once, a consumer staples name buying its way into a mobility market that the Gulf's economic transformation keeps feeding.