Saudi Exchange Brand Guidelines: Tadawul, a 2021 Group Rebrand and the Aramco Listing

Banks, a registry and a 2007 company.

The Saudi Exchange is the stock market of Saudi Arabia, based in Riyadh, and the name it has carried since 2021; before that it was the Saudi Stock Exchange, known as Tadawul. Arabic Wikipedia traces the market’s roots to 1932, when the kingdom’s first joint-stock company, the Arab Automobile Company, was formed, and counts 14 joint-stock companies by 1975. Shares changed hands informally until 1984, when a royal order organised trading, placed day-to-day supervision with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency and limited share brokerage to the commercial banks.

The same year, Arabic Wikipedia says, the commercial banks founded the Saudi Share Registration Company to handle central registration, clearing and settlement; English Wikipedia dates that company to 1980. Automated settlement followed in 1989, an electronic share-information system in 1990 and the trading system named Tadawul in October 2001. The Capital Market Authority, which regulates the market, was established on 31 July 2003, according to Arabic Wikipedia.

English Wikipedia says Tadawul was formed in 2007 as a joint-stock company and the sole entity authorised to act as a securities exchange in the kingdom. Argaam, the Saudi financial news service, gave the same year when it profiled the company in December 2021, adding that it was set up in Riyadh and was then wholly owned by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. The market’s main index is the Tadawul All Share Index, or TASI. English Wikipedia records the index at its highest on 25 February 2006, followed by a sharp fall that the article calls “Black February”; Arabic Wikipedia puts the later low point in March 2009.

A parallel market and a record listing.

The exchange widened its offer in the decade after 2007. On 26 February 2017, English Wikipedia says, it launched Nomu, a parallel equity market with lighter listing requirements, as an alternative route to a public listing. In early 2019, Arabic Wikipedia says, the Saudi market joined the FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones emerging-market indices. Post-trade services were built up alongside: the group’s 2020 annual report says the depository company Edaa was established in 2016 and the clearing house Muqassa was formed in 2018 and began operating in 2020.

The listing that made the exchange known worldwide came in December 2019. Shares in Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, began trading on 11 December 2019, English Wikipedia says. Asharq Al-Awsat, reporting in April 2021 from a Reuters story, called Aramco’s late-2019 listing the world’s biggest initial public offering and described Tadawul as the Arab world’s largest stock exchange by the combined value of its companies. Listings continued after 2020: Argaam counted the exchange’s own parent as the eighth initial public offering of 2021, after names that included Theeb Rent a Car, Tanmiah Food and the utility developer ACWA Power.

Argaam put the number of listed companies at 192, not counting 17 real-estate investment traded funds, once the group itself had joined the board in December 2021. English Wikipedia gives 239 companies on the main market as of 10 October 2024. Trading runs from Sunday to Thursday in a single daily session, and the market closes for the kingdom’s official holidays: Saudi National Day, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

How exchanges present themselves.

Stock exchanges sell something that cannot be held: access to a market. Most of their public image is therefore built from rituals, rooms and numbers rather than products. One common ritual is the ceremony around the opening or closing of trading. Borsa İstanbul, for example, says it announces the start and end of each session by ringing a bell symbolically, offers bell-ringing ceremonies to listed companies and other organisations, and hands guests a crystal gong hammer as a keepsake.

Rooms come next. Older exchanges often began in borrowed spaces: the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened in 1990 in the ballroom of a hotel on the Bund before moving to a purpose-built tower in Pudong. Exchanges also show off their trading floors and technology: Borsa İstanbul lists a renewed trading floor and a primary data centre among its milestones. Exchange buildings themselves, from façades to statues at the entrance, become part of the identity.

Numbers carry the rest. Index names such as the SSE Composite or the BIST 100 work as brands in their own right, quoted daily in news reports and printed on tickers and screens. Listing ceremonies supply the backdrops that newly listed companies use in their own announcements, and cross-border links such as Stock Connect give exchanges a story to tell about reach.

Exchanges also publish a great deal: annual and integrated reports, investor-education material and milestone timelines. This guide uses those documents alongside independent dated sources, and marks clearly where a fact rests only on the exchange’s own account. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the exchanges’ own marks.

A group name, an exchange name, a new identity.

The present structure dates from April 2021. On 7 April that year, Asharq Al-Awsat reported, the exchange converted itself into a holding company renamed Saudi Tadawul Group ahead of its own initial public offering, with four subsidiaries: the Saudi Exchange, its stock-exchange business; the Securities Clearing Center Company, Muqassa; the Securities Depository Center Company, Edaa; and an innovation unit, Wamid. The group’s 2020 annual report says the holding company took effect from 7 April 2021, wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund, and describes the Saudi Exchange as a company newly established in 2021 by spinning off the exchange activities; Argaam later gave 20 May as the date of the conversion.

The renaming was a branding project as much as a legal one. The branding consultancy FutureBrand says, in a case study, that it worked on the reorganisation’s naming, brand architecture and identity: it lifted the Tadawul name to group level as Saudi Tadawul Group, refined the exchange’s name to Saudi Exchange, created a dual-language naming system meant to keep existing equity, and tied the subsidiaries together under a new visual identity, while the unregulated innovation company was given an independent brand of its own. The 2020 annual report likewise says the restructuring was accompanied by a rebranding of the entire group.

The group then listed on its own market. Saudi Tadawul Group Holding began trading on the Saudi Exchange on 8 December 2021, under the symbol 1111 in the diversified financials sector, Argaam reported that day; 36 million shares were offered, 70 percent of them to institutions. The market the group operates is regulated by the Capital Market Authority, and English Wikipedia says it has been partially self-regulating since 2018.

For a design guide, the Saudi Exchange shows how a market can take a plainer name without losing an older one: in FutureBrand’s account, Tadawul moved up to the group and the exchange became the Saudi Exchange. Compare it with the HKEX and NYSE guides. For this guide we use a deep green, warm sand, brass and ink with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Saudi Exchange’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.