Lulu Brand Guidelines: An Abu Dhabi Hypermarket Chain, LOT Value Shops & a 2024 ADX Listing

An Abu Dhabi supermarket, then a Dubai hypermarket.

Lulu is the hypermarket chain run from Abu Dhabi by the retail business of M. A. Yusuff Ali, an Indian-born businessman. Its founding date depends on what is being counted. The National, reporting on the company’s stock-market listing in November 2024, said Lulu was founded by Yusuff Ali in 1974. English Wikipedia, in its article on LuLu Group International, dates the group to 1980 and says its first supermarket opened in Abu Dhabi in 1995, followed by LuLu Center department stores in the late 1990s.

The hypermarket format came next. English Wikipedia says the first Lulu Hypermarket opened in Dubai in 2000, and that the chain then spread across the United Arab Emirates and into Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. The group’s own name is often written with two capitals, as in LuLu Group International, while The National and Khaleej Times write Lulu in their business coverage; this guide uses Lulu.

The chain also moved beyond the Gulf. In June 2016 Inside Retail Asia reported that Lulu Group had opened its first hypermarket in Indonesia, in the Cakung district of East Jakarta, covering more than 200,000 square feet; at that point the group had 126 stores, some of them in India, and more than 38,000 employees. By October 2020, The National reported, Lulu operated 194 hypermarkets and shopping malls across the Gulf, Egypt and the Far East, employed more than 55,000 people and ran sourcing operations and food-processing units in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and China. In Egypt it then had two hypermarkets in Cairo, a Lulu spokesman told the paper.

Hypermarket, Xpress and LOT.

Lulu presents itself through several store formats rather than one. The large Lulu Hypermarket is the core of the business. The National illustrated its November 2024 report on the share offer with a photograph of a Lulu Xpress branch in Abu Dhabi, a smaller neighbourhood format, and its listing-day report with a Lulu hypermarket in Riyadh. English Wikipedia lists hypermarkets in India, Malaysia and Indonesia as well as the Gulf, and says that in 2025 the group opened stores called LOT The Value Shop in a number of Middle East locations.

LOT is the newest name on the fascia. In July 2025 Gulf News reported that Lulu had three LOT stores running in the UAE and had just opened three in Saudi Arabia, including one in the Al Malaz district of Riyadh covering 18,772 square feet, with every item priced under a fixed low ceiling. A partner at Redseer Consulting told the paper that the format competed with Miniso, Daiso and other “dollar store” chains rather than with the neighbourhood baqala grocers found across the Gulf.

Own labels and sourcing are the other half of the story. At the Gulfood trade show in January 2026, Yusuff Ali, chairman and managing director of Lulu Group International, told Gulf News that the group was buying more produce directly from farms, expanding contract farming in India and exploring similar arrangements in Sri Lanka and parts of Africa. The paper reported that Lulu was widening the Indian states it buys from, adding Assam, Meghalaya and Himachal Pradesh to established sources such as Punjab, Maharashtra and Kerala, and had signed new agreements with suppliers and producer bodies from Lithuania, the United States and Saudi Arabia. He said the group had built sourcing and logistics centres in 27 countries, and the group’s director of marketing and communications said it was adding to its private-label range. The same report said Lulu had partnered with Amazon and Talabat to reach online shoppers, and that online sales were still a small share of the business, by the company’s own account.

How Gulf retailers present themselves.

Gulf hypermarket, grocery and electronics retailers are mostly seen from the car park. A hypermarket façade carries one short name in large letters, often in both Latin and Arabic script, and the same name is repeated on trolleys, shelf labels, carrier bags and the delivery app. Many chains run more than one size of store, from a large hypermarket in a mall to a smaller neighbourhood branch, and they often give each size its own version of the name rather than a new one.

The retail calendar shapes how these brands appear through the year. Ramadan and Eid, national-day celebrations and the start of the school term bring seasonal campaigns, special displays and printed or digital offer leaflets, and the companies publish these on their own websites, apps and social channels. Own-label ranges sit beside international brands on the shelves, with their own packaging under the retailer’s name or a separate label.

Not every chain in this group sells food. Bookshop chains combine stationery, school supplies and books with gadget aisles, and electronics retailers fill their stores with phones, laptops, televisions and home appliances. Their store fascias tend to follow the same pattern as the grocers: one name, read from a distance, often in two scripts.

Behind the shopfront, the corporate side is published separately. Listed retailers post annual reports, results and board details on their investor pages and through the Saudi Exchange (Tadawul), the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange or the Dubai Financial Market, while family-owned and group-owned chains describe their founders, owners and history on corporate “about us” pages. This guide uses those pages and dated press reports, and marks clearly what rests on a company’s own account.

A listing on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange.

The retail business went public in 2024. Lulu Retail sold 30 per cent of its share capital in an initial public offering, after enlarging the offer from 25 per cent on strong demand, The National reported on 6 November 2024; its cornerstone investors included pension and investment funds from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. The shares began trading on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange on 14 November 2024 under the ticker LULU and closed that day at their opening price, the paper reported, after a dip earlier in the session; it was the most traded stock on the exchange that day. Khaleej Times reported that more than 82,000 retail investors had subscribed for shares.

At listing, The National reported that Lulu had more than 240 hypermarkets and shopping malls in ten countries, including India, Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia, across its group. It named Yusuff Ali as chairman and managing director and Saifee Rupawala as chief executive of Lulu Retail. On listing day Yusuff Ali told Khaleej Times that many of the company’s 55,000 employees had been with it for decades, and the company listed private label and its loyalty programme among the four pillars of its growth strategy, the paper reported.

For a design guide, Lulu shows how a grocery group builds a family of fascias — hypermarket, Xpress and LOT — around one short, easily read name. Compare Carrefour, the French hypermarket brand, and LuLu Money, the money-transfer brand that shares the LuLu name. For this guide we use a deep green, a warm saffron and a date-palm cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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