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A market of 900 active carriers has its first common framework, and the commercial layer that lets a merchant reach all of them at once is still being built privately.
Kuwait’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry issued the country’s first broad framework for delivery platforms this summer, extending a regime that began with restaurant delivery to cover every electronic platform that displays, orders and delivers products to consumers. Ministerial Decision No. 109 of 2026 sets ceilings on commissions and delivery fees, obliges platforms to disclose paid placements to shoppers, and requires licensed operators to reclassify their activity under a dedicated digital intermediation code before 1 September. Minister Osama Boodai has described it as a qualitative shift in the regulation of Kuwaiti e commerce, built on balancing the interests of consumers, small businesses and the platforms themselves.
The sector has used the consultation window the minister left open. More than 250 delivery companies, through the delivery company owners’ committee under the small and medium enterprise body, asked for the rules affecting their own tier to be studied further, arguing that a regulation written around platforms, merchants and consumers has not yet set out the corresponding framework for the operators who move the goods. Sources told Al Jarida that a single delivery costs roughly 850 fils over a distance of up to 20 kilometres, while delivery companies supply drivers and vehicles to platforms at between KD 0.950 and KD 1.350 per order. Boodai has said the ministry will listen to every observation raised during implementation.
Nine hundred active companies, one missing layer
Underneath the consultation sits a number that describes the sector better than the dispute does. The same reporting counts 2,000 registered delivery companies in Kuwait, of which roughly 900 are active. That is a measure of how quickly Kuwaitis have built businesses around delivery and how open the sector has stayed to new entrants. It also means no single operator carries enough of the market to set a national service standard, and a merchant shipping 200 parcels a month still has to find, price, contract and chase every carrier individually.
Kuwait has already solved the harder half of this problem. KNET consolidated card acceptance behind a single national rail two decades ago, and the instant payment scheme Wamd extended the same logic to account transfers in 2024. The Central Bank’s data shows what that infrastructure now carries: consumer spending in the first half of 2026 reached KD 27.9 billion across cards and Wamd, of which KD 9.45 billion ran through point of sale terminals, KD 8.53 billion through websites and KD 4.36 billion through cash withdrawals. By the end of 2025 there were 7.56 million active bank cards in circulation, about 155 percent of the population, and more than 110,400 point of sale terminals. Few markets of Kuwait’s size have built a payments layer this deep.
The layer the private sector is building
The equivalent for delivery is what iCarry, founded by Dhari Al Mutawa, set out to build. The Kuwaiti platform aggregates carriers rather than running a fleet, letting a merchant compare and book across couriers from one dashboard, with shared tracking, reporting and cash on delivery reconciliation behind it. “It’s a platform like Booking.com where you have multiple carriers on one platform,” Al Mutawa said, putting the count at more than 60 last mile companies across its markets. Its published carrier panel includes Aramex, DHL Express, FedEx, Emirates Post, Careem, Quiqup, Naqel and SkyEx, alongside integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart and the Saudi store builders Salla and Zid.
The model is designed to add to carrier revenue rather than take from it. Al Mutawa has said the hardest part of building the business was convincing carriers he was not coming for their customers. “We’re doing the customer service on behalf of the customer, we’re doing the cash on delivery,” he said. “We’re not really competition. We actually help them grow as well.” For an operator working on thin per order economics, the most expensive line is not fuel. It is finding the next merchant. A platform that hands over order flow the carrier did not pay to acquire is a distribution channel.
The caveat in the demand data
One number cuts against the aggregation case and belongs in the account. The value of online spending has climbed, but the count has not moved with it. Transactions through websites inside Kuwait totalled 280.2 million in 2025 against 278.2 million in 2024, while point of sale transactions rose 14.6 percent to 910.89 million. Shoppers are putting more into each online basket rather than placing more orders, and an aggregator is paid per parcel rather than per dinar. iCarry’s domestic volume has to come from signing merchants and from cross border shipping rather than from order frequency at home.
Decision 109 of 2026 governs consumer ordering apps rather than merchant side parcel logistics, so it does not regulate iCarry directly. What it does is set a precedent. Kuwait has now written rules for the most visible part of its delivery economy. The commercial layer that turns 900 separate operators into one usable network is the part the market was always going to build, and a Kuwaiti company is building it across four countries at once.
