The succession gap: readiness across sixty GCC family groups

Executive summary

The next decade of Gulf governance will be defined by a generational handover that most boards are not yet ready for. Across the sixty GCC family-controlled listed companies in this study, forty-seven, almost four out of five, expect a succession event at the CEO or chair level within the next five years. Of those forty-seven, fourteen have a documented internal successor whose name the board could give us with the candidate's awareness. The gap between the boards that have a plan and the boards that have a name is the single most consequential governance question this market faces.

The arithmetic is generational. The patriarchs who founded the modern Gulf groups in the 1960s and 1970s passed effective control to their sons during the 1990s and 2000s. That G1 to G2 transition produced the present incumbent population: median age fifty-eight, median tenure eleven years, with a meaningful concentration of CEOs now in their early-to-mid sixties. The G2 to G3 transition is now arriving, in most cases without the planning rhythm that the G1 to G2 transition was given. G3 is older than G2 was at handover; G3 is more internationally educated, more frequently entrepreneurial, and more likely to have built its own credibility outside the family group before being asked to take it over.

This report sets out four findings from the corpus and the interview programme that informed it.

First, the succession horizon is closer than most boards acknowledge in their formal disclosures. Of the forty-seven companies expecting a transition within five years, twelve expect one within twenty-four months. The clustering matters because the supporting infrastructure, search firms, regulators, family councils, governance advisers, cannot serve all twelve in parallel.

Second, the readiness gap is wider than expected. Fourteen of sixty have a documented successor. Twenty-three have an informal heir-apparent whose appointment the board would describe as likely but not formally agreed. Twenty-three have no successor identified at the time of writing.

Third, the assumption that the G3 family successor will step in is breaking down. In our interview programme of eighteen sitting chairs, conducted in Q4 2025 across Riyadh, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, more than half described G3 candidates who had explicitly chosen private investing, founding ventures, or careers outside the family group. The default has shifted; the boards that still treat family succession as the base case are working with a model the underlying generation has already moved past.

Fourth, three transition models now produce credible outcomes. Family Chair plus non-family CEO is the most common and the workhorse of the next decade. Family CEO with a strong non-family second-line is the mid-cap pattern, vulnerable to its own succession problem one cycle later. Family-stepped-back-to-Board with a full external operating layer is the most modern, the rarest, and the structure most G3 principals are quietly moving toward.

For boards, regulators and capital markets, the implication is direct. The boards that begin the succession conversation now, with the rigour the G1 to G2 transition received, will produce successors whose appointments outside capital can support. The boards that defer will, at the median, be running unplanned successions in front of capital markets that have grown sharply less tolerant of governance opacity.

The succession event horizon: what's coming

The first question this study asked was a timing question. For each of the sixty companies in the corpus, we mapped the probability and expected window of a CEO or chair transition over the next five years, drawing on three sources: the company's public disclosures, the JOH Partners mandate book and informal conversations conducted under non-attribution rules with eighteen sitting chairs during Q4 2025. The picture that emerged was tighter than we expected when the work began.

Forty-seven of sixty, seventy-eight percent, expect an event within the five-year window. Twelve, twenty percent, expect one within twenty-four months. The compression at the front of the window is the operationally consequential figure. The supporting infrastructure that a Gulf-listed family group draws on during a CEO transition, the senior search market, the regulator's review of fit-and-proper standards, the family council process, the investor communications layer, was not built to serve a dozen parallel processes at the senior end of the market over a two-year horizon. In practice, several of these processes will run faster than they should, or slower than they should, because the bench of supporting professionals is finite.

The age and tenure distribution of the current incumbents explains why the cluster has formed. The median CEO in the corpus is fifty-eight years old. The median tenure is eleven years. The standard deviation on age is small enough that a substantial share of the population sits within five years of either side of sixty, which is the age at which most G2 principals begin the personal conversation about succession. The standard deviation on tenure is also small, with the bulk of incumbents having been appointed during the 2010 to 2017 window, when the post-financial-crisis governance reset and the early Vision 2030 announcements together produced an unusually active period of senior appointments across the region.

The generational arithmetic underneath the timing distribution is the deeper story. The G1 to G2 transitions were largely completed during the 1990s and early 2000s. The G2 generation is the current incumbent population. The G3 transition is what the next five years will substantially be about. G3, in our corpus, is on average seventeen years older at the moment of expected handover than G2 was at the equivalent moment, reflecting longer education, more international career investment, and a generational pattern of later family entry. G3 is also more likely than G2 was to enter the family group with prior senior experience built outside it, which changes the readiness profile of the candidate population in ways the boards are still working through.

The readiness gap: fourteen of sixty

If the timing question describes the urgency, the readiness question describes the gap. The corpus splits, on the readiness dimension, into three populations. The first is the boards with a documented internal successor: a named candidate, with the candidate's awareness, with a development plan, with a board-level review process around the appointment. The second is the boards with an informal heir-apparent: a candidate the board would say, in private, is likely to be appointed, but where the documentation, the development plan and the candidate's awareness are not all in place. The third is the boards with no successor identified: where the conversation has not yet begun, or has begun and not produced a name, or has produced a name that has subsequently fallen out of contention.

The fourteen companies in the documented category are not, in most cases, the largest. Six of the fourteen are mid-cap groups whose boards have run a structured succession programme over the last five years, often with external advisory support, and whose principals were prepared to commit to the documentation discipline that the standard requires. Four of the fourteen are larger groups whose chairs have personally driven the process, in most cases against the grain of an organisation that did not historically see itself needing this kind of formality. The remaining four are mid-cap groups where the family principal has stepped back into a chair role and, in doing so, professionalised the CEO process from above.

The twenty-three companies in the informal category are the most operationally interesting. They are, in many cases, boards that have done substantial internal work but have not yet brought it to documentation. The reasons vary. Several have a likely G3 successor whose readiness for a public appointment is not yet certain and whose name the board does not want to surface prematurely. Several have a non-family senior executive whose appointment is plausible but who has not yet been formally tested by the board. Several have a candidate whose appointment the principal personally favours but whose appointment the wider family or the independent directors would resist if surfaced too early.

The twenty-three companies with no successor identified are the immediate priority. In nine of the twenty-three, the conversation has not yet begun in any structured form. In the remaining fourteen, the conversation has begun but has not produced a credible candidate, in most cases because the bench is genuinely thin and the board has not yet committed to the idea of widening the search outside the family or outside the existing senior layer of the group.

The gap between fourteen and forty-seven is the operational story of this report. Thirty-three boards expect a transition within five years and do not have a named, documented successor. The aggregate hiring volume implied by closing this gap is several times the annual senior search capacity that the regional market currently supports.

Why family successors are no longer the default

In the G1 to G2 transition that most of the corpus completed during the 1990s and 2000s, the family successor was the unstated default. Only a small number of groups during that cycle appointed non-family CEOs at the moment of transition, and most of those appointments were in regulated financial-services subsidiaries rather than at group-holding level. In the G2 to G3 transition that is now arriving, the family successor is no longer the unstated default. Four shifts have moved the picture.

The first shift is generational and personal. In the interview programme, more than half of the eighteen sitting chairs described G3 candidates who had explicitly chosen other paths. The most common pattern is the G3 principal who has built a credible career in private investing, often after a US or UK MBA and a period at a global investment firm, who is reluctant to take on the operating responsibility of the family group when the alternative is continuing a personally controlled investment thesis. The second pattern is the G3 founder who has built a venture, sometimes a meaningful one, and who is reluctant to wind that venture down to take the family role. The third pattern, less common but increasingly visible, is the G3 principal who has chosen a senior career in a different family group or in an institution outside the region, and whose return to the founding group is no longer assumed by either party.

The second shift is regulatory and capital-markets driven. Tadawul, ADX, DFM and the smaller GCC exchanges have raised the disclosure standards on senior appointments materially since 2020. The Saudi corporate governance regulations issued by the Capital Market Authority, the UAE Federal Decree-Law 32/2021 and its subsequent implementing decisions, and the Qatar Financial Markets Authority code revisions all read, when stacked together, as a single push toward independent oversight, fit-and-proper testing, and documented qualification standards for senior appointments at listed entities. The G3 family successor who would have walked into the role in 2005 cannot, in most cases, walk into the role in 2026 without the documentation that demonstrates the suitability standards have been met. The boards that have not built that documentation discipline are running a regulatory risk they are not always pricing.

The third shift is the complexity of the underlying business. The Gulf family-controlled listed group of 1995 was, in most cases, a multi-vertical conglomerate held together by a strong founder and a long-tenured senior team. The Gulf family-controlled listed group of 2026 is a multi-vertical conglomerate with, in most cases, a regional or international expansion programme, a digital and AI overlay being built across operating units, exposure to private-equity-style transactions in some divisions, and a stakeholder base that includes foreign passive capital, sukuk holders and ESG-screening institutional investors. The skill profile required to hold this complexity at CEO level is materially different from the profile that ran the same group in 1995. A G3 successor who has not built that skill profile, often through external experience, is a riskier appointment than the G2 generation typically was.

The fourth shift is the rise of the credible non-family CEO model. Across the corpus, twenty-one of sixty groups have, at some point in the last decade, appointed a non-family CEO. Of those twenty-one, sixteen appointments are still in seat and rated by their boards as successful. The credibility of the non-family CEO option has, in other words, been earned. Boards that, in 2010, would not have considered the option are now able to point to multiple credible regional examples and to the operational track record those examples have produced. The non-family CEO is no longer the exception; the family CEO is no longer the default.

Three transition models that work

In the population of completed G1 to G2 transitions and the smaller population of completed G2 to G3 transitions in the corpus, three transition models recur as the patterns that produce credible outcomes. Each model is a different answer to the same underlying question of how the family stays connected to the operating business while the operating business takes on the discipline that listed-company governance now requires.

The Family Chair plus non-family CEO model is the most common pattern in the corpus and, in our view, the workhorse of the next decade. The structure works when the chair is genuinely active, sits in the room with the senior team on a weekly cadence (not annually), holds the family relationships and the strategic narrative, and gives the non-family CEO the authority to run the business. It fails when the chair drifts back into a ceremonial role and the CEO is left to manage the principal stakeholders directly without the chair's air cover, or when the chair stays operationally involved at a level of detail that prevents the CEO from taking the decisions a CEO is paid to take. The capability requirement on the chair, in this model, is substantially more demanding than the role description in most family group constitutions suggests. The chair has to know the business, has to be present with it, has to be credible to the senior team, and has to hold the family relationships behind the operating layer.

The Family CEO with strong non-family second-line model works in mid-cap contexts where the family principal carries genuine operating credibility and the underlying complexity is contained enough that a single principal can hold it. The structure depends on the depth and seniority of the second-line, typically a non-family COO, CFO and CHRO who together represent the operating discipline of the group. The model fails in two ways. The first is the succession-of-the-successor problem: the family CEO is, by definition, going to need a successor in turn, and the second-line is often the de facto bench, which means the bench is also the running team and cannot easily be promoted without depleting the layer that is making the model work. The second is talent retention: a senior non-family executive serving as the operating discipline behind a family CEO is, in 2026, a highly portable profile, and the global majors and regional sovereign-anchored platforms are net importers of exactly this kind of operator.

The Family-stepped-back-to-Board model is the most modern of the three, the rarest, and the structure most G3 principals in our interview programme described as the direction they want to move toward. The model places the family at the board level, with no operating role, and runs a full external operating layer underneath. The capability requirement is on the board, not on the family in operations: the board has to have the discipline to run a senior succession process, to review the operating layer's performance with rigour, and to hold the family's strategic intent without translating it into operating interference. The model fails when the family loses operational instinct over time, drifts away from the day-to-day reality of the business, and is then unable to make the strategic calls a board has to make at moments of stress. The model also requires the family to accept a kind of operating distance that, in many GCC family configurations, runs against the cultural grain of how the group has historically worked.

No single model dominates. The right model depends on the size of the group, the configuration of the family, the maturity of the senior layer and the stage of the underlying business. The boards that get succession right tend to be the ones that have, deliberately, chosen the model that fits their reality, rather than defaulting into the model that the previous generation used.

The shift in the generational arithmetic is significant. The G3 successor arriving at handover at forty-three, with fourteen years of senior experience and a roughly even chance of having built it externally, is a different profile from the G2 successor who arrived at thirty-six, with nine years of experience, of which a much smaller share was external. The G3 profile has more leverage at the moment of handover, more options outside the family group, and a stronger personal track record. The G3 successor is also, in most cases, more expensive: the family role has to be priced, structured and developed against an external opportunity cost that the G2 generation was not, in most cases, weighing.

What boards should do in 2026

The implications of the corpus and the interview programme for boards in 2026 are practical. Six actions, in our view, distinguish the boards that will run their succession well from the boards that will run it badly.

First, map the five-year transition horizon for every senior seat, not just CEO. The corpus shows that succession events cluster: a CEO transition typically triggers movement at COO, CFO and sometimes CHRO level within twelve to twenty-four months, because the new CEO will, in most cases, want to bring forward their own senior team. The board that has only mapped the CEO seat is going to find itself running three or four senior searches in parallel within two years. The board that has mapped all of the senior seats can sequence the transitions, prioritise the bench investment, and avoid the parallel-search compression that produces poor appointments.

Second, build the bench publicly within the family before the founder steps back. The interview programme surfaced a recurring pattern: in groups where the G3 successor was credibly developed, the development was typically public, structured and family-wide, with multiple G3 candidates given senior operating roles in the group's subsidiaries before the principal seat was offered to the strongest. In groups where the G3 successor was not credibly developed, the development was typically private and held within the principal's personal relationship with the chosen successor, which produced both a weaker candidate and a wider family unhappy at the lack of process. The public bench, paradoxically, is the bench that protects the family relationships rather than fracturing them.

Third, bring in the non-family chair or independent director who can hold the conversation. The succession process is genuinely difficult to run from inside the family. The non-family chair, or, where the chair is family, the senior independent director who can run the succession process on the chair's authority, is the structural answer. The boards that get this right tend to make the appointment two to three years before the succession event is expected, which gives the independent figure time to build the family relationships and the operating credibility that the role requires.

Fourth, document the succession plan; do not rely on tribal knowledge. The interview programme surfaced a clear pattern: in groups where the succession was clearly documented, in writing, with a named candidate, a development plan and a board-level review process, the succession was substantially more likely to be successful and to be perceived as legitimate by the wider family and by the capital markets. In groups where the succession was held in tribal knowledge, in the personal relationship between the principal and the successor, the succession was substantially more likely to surface conflict at the moment of transition, when the principal stakeholders who were not in the original conversation realised the decision had been made without them.

Fifth, run a structured external assessment of internal candidates. The boards that get the readiness assessment right tend to use an external partner to run a structured assessment of the internal candidates, including psychometric and behavioural assessments, structured interviews against a competency model and reference work that goes beyond the candidates' personal networks. The boards that do not run this work are, in most cases, running the assessment on the principal's instinct, which is a method that has, historically, produced both excellent and very poor outcomes with no easy way for the board to predict which.

Sixth, test the plan against a regulatory or market shock scenario. The succession plan that holds in steady-state markets often does not hold under a sudden regulatory change or a market shock that forces the transition earlier than expected. The boards that run a pre-mortem on their succession plan against, for example, an unplanned departure of the incumbent, a fit-and-proper challenge from the regulator, or a sukuk covenant breach that requires a CEO change, surface the weak points in the plan before the weak points become actual transitions.

The boards that run these six actions, in our experience and in the corpus, close their succession events on the timing they choose, with the candidate they choose, and at a cost the capital markets and the wider family can support. The boards that do not run them are, in most cases, running unplanned successions in front of a capital base that has grown substantially less tolerant of governance opacity. The arithmetic in the corpus, forty-seven of sixty expecting a transition, fourteen with a documented successor, is the arithmetic of a market that has not yet committed to the discipline its own size now requires.

Methodology and sample

The corpus consists of sixty GCC family-controlled listed companies, drawn from the constituent lists of Tadawul, ADX, DFM, the Qatar Stock Exchange, Boursa Kuwait, the Bahrain Bourse and the Muscat Stock Exchange. Inclusion criteria: family-controlled, defined as a single family or a small group of related families holding twenty percent or more of the voting equity, either directly or through holding vehicles; listed on a GCC exchange; market capitalisation above the smallest twenty percent of listed entities on the relevant exchange at the time of inclusion. The corpus is identical to the corpus used for the Q1 2026 chair report and is intended to support a multi-year longitudinal view.

Data sources: company disclosures filed with the relevant exchange and regulator; annual reports for the most recent reporting period available at the time of inclusion; the JOH Partners proprietary mandate book covering 2014 to Q1 2026; and an interview programme conducted under non-attribution rules with eighteen sitting chairs across Riyadh, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha during Q4 2025.

Limits: the readiness classification depends, in part, on the interview programme, which produced more nuance than public disclosures alone would have allowed; readiness numbers may shift if a board completes documentation work between the cut-off date of this study and the publication date. The G3 generational arithmetic is corpus-internal and may not generalise to the wider regional family-business population, which includes substantial unlisted entities that do not face the same disclosure pressure. The forecast horizon, five years, is sensitive to actuarial assumptions about incumbent retirement age and to regulatory changes that may, between now and 2031, shift the mix of expected events.

Acknowledged limits aside, the figures in this report are the most reliable view of the GCC family-controlled listed succession horizon that the practice has been able to construct. The work will be revisited annually.

JOH Partners runs senior succession mandates and chair-level appointments across the Gulf's family-controlled listed sector. For confidential conversations on succession planning at CEO and chair level, contact the partners directly.