Nomu: What boards need to know about Saudi Arabia’s parallel stock market
Since its launch nine years ago, Saudi Arabia’s parallel stock market – Nomu – has hosted nearly 150 listings, evolving into an important growth platform for private companies seeking to go public. Experts from Haykala review Nomu’s progress to date and explore its outlook for the year ahead.
Nomu is Saudi Arabia’s parallel stock market where smaller and growing companies list under lighter rules than the main Tadawul exchange, with trading restricted to qualified investors. It exists to answer one question for an owner or a board: is there a credible path to public capital before a company is big enough for the main market?
As part today, Nomu’s record covers 145 companies and one REIT, offered at a median 15.4x earnings and 3.9x book value. Twenty-one have since graduated to the main market.
For any company weighing to go public on Nomu, three lessons stand out:
A real track record
The staircase model works. Graduates were offered on Nomu at a median 14.0x earnings and now trade at 19.6x on Tadawul – a roughly 40% uplift earned through two years of clean public-company execution, not a one-off market rally.
Demand was never the constraint
The typical Nomu IPO was covered 2.7 times over (a 271% median across 114 primary offerings), and 32 more companies skipped the raise entirely via direct listing. The real test comes after the first trade, not before it.
The market has normalised
Nomu’s premium over the main market has compressed from 27–32x in 2022–24 to 21.9x against 17.8x today, and briefly dipped below the main market in March. Still a premium – but one that now has to be earned rather than assumed.
What’s new in 2026?
Two Capital Market Authority (CMA) decisions this April reshaped what Nomu can be used for. SPACs can now list on the market: a licensed sponsor raises cash publicly, then has 24 months, extendable once by 12, to acquire an unlisted Saudi company, with dissenting investors able to redeem their shares from escrow.
Separately, the CMA opened Nomu to publicly offered financing investment funds – credit vehicles previously restricted to private placement.
Both changes point the same way, and both matter to owners: more products, more issuers, and more routes into the public market than a conventional IPO alone.
The GCC context
Regionally, Nomu has no real peer. The UAE’s and Oman’s largest recent listings have been big privatisations and carve-outs; junior boards elsewhere in the Gulf – Abu Dhabi’s growth market, Muscat’s parallel board, Qatar’s venture market – have drawn only a handful of listings between them.
Nomu, by contrast, lists roughly two dozen companies a year, more than half in Vision 2030-aligned sectors such as technology, healthcare and logistics, with total market value having grown more than twenty-five-fold since inception to around SAR 60 billion. It is increasingly compared to London’s AIM as the region’s production line for small-cap public capital.
The honest caveat
Coverage at the IPO is not liquidity afterward. Because trading is restricted to qualified investors, many names trade thinly, performance is widely dispersed, and 2025 was a difficult year for Saudi equities generally even as listings continued.
All pre-offering shares are locked up for a year, and a company can list with as few as 50 public shareholders – enough to be public, not enough to guarantee a liquid market. Getting onto Nomu is the easy part; staying interesting to investors afterward is the job.
The outlook
The pipeline into late 2026 looks strong, backed by GCC growth well above the global average and a queue of deals delayed from 2025.
Saudi Arabia remains the volume engine of the Gulf’s equity markets, and Nomu its busiest board by number of deals. But a market that no longer re-rates everything rewards three things: credible growth, pricing that leaves room for the aftermarket, and governance built before the prospectus is drafted – not after.
Key takeaways for boards
Nine years of data show Nomu working broadly as designed, turning private companies into credible public ones and rewarding those that treat listing as the start of the discipline, not the end of it. For companies seeking to float on Nomu:
Plan the transition from day one
The re-rating from 14.0x to 19.6x is earned over two years of clean execution against a sustained SAR 200 million market-value bar, so set the equity story and disclosure habits against the main-market bar from the start.
Price for the aftermarket, not the order book
A 2.7x-covered book feels like success on offering day, but an aggressive price in a thin, qualified-investor market is repaid with a weak chart — and a weak chart delays the transition.
Prepare 12–18 months ahead
Audited numbers, a converted legal form and board-level governance now open three routes to market: a conventional IPO, a direct listing, or a merger with a listed SPAC. Companies that start early choose their moment; those that don’t have it chosen for them.
