‘The secret world of secondaries’: How a niche area of finance is emerging as a new liquidity engine in the Gulf
Source: Fortune ·
As global and regional liquidity tightens, a nascent Gulf secondary market is giving investors, founders, and early backers a new route to monetisation
From the source
In recent years, the Gulf’s secondaries market has started transitioning from a niche area of finance to an increasingly important allocation channel for capital. With traditional exit pathways, such as IPOs, seeing a notable slowdown, secondaries have become an increasingly appealing route to liquidity for investors in the region amid tougher fundraising conditions and slower exits. Secondaries refer to the buying and selling of pre-existing investor commitments and ownership stakes in private equity and VC funds, which makes it harder to obtain data on them. However, Gulf secondary-market turnover on Bloomberg’s electronic markets platform almost doubled from $22 billion in 2022 to $40 billion in 2025, while issuance increased from $246 billion to $452 billion over the same period. Average electronic trade sizes grew from around $500,000 to $900,000. “Secondary transactions have been happening in the region for several years, but many of them have not been publicly captured,” says…