Company · Logistics & Infrastructure
Agility built a freight empire across the emerging world, sold it to a Danish rival for stock, and used the proceeds to buy airports' ground crews and fuel tankers instead. Here is how a Kuwaiti warehousing company became a holding company for the plumbing of global trade.
Most logistics companies spend their whole lives trying to move one more box for one more cent. Agility spent four decades doing exactly that across some of the hardest markets on earth, built one of the developing world's largest freight-forwarding operations, and then, in 2021, did the thing almost nobody in the industry does on purpose. It sold that business. The buyer was DSV, a Danish rival. The currency was not cash but stock. And when the paperwork cleared, the Kuwaiti company that had just exited freight forwarding owned roughly 8% of the company it sold to - a stake worth several billion dollars.
That single move explains most of what Agility is today. It is no longer primarily a mover of freight. It is an owner-operator and long-term investor: a holding company that buys controlling stakes in the sector-leading businesses trade depends on, runs them, and holds equity in others. If DHL and Kuehne+Nagel are trying to win the race, Agility decided to own the track, the fuel and the ground crew instead.
Origins
Agility began in 1979 as a public warehousing company, created by an Amiri Decree to build storage and infrastructure for Kuwait. For its first two decades it was a regional operation with a regional job: hold goods, manage yards, keep the country's supply lines stocked. The pivot came in 1997, when Tarek Sultan took the helm and began a campaign of acquisitions that ran to more than forty deals over three decades. The warehouse company went shopping, and it went global.
Along the way it picked up businesses that had little to do with racking and everything to do with the movement of goods and fuel: a majority stake in the energy-logistics firm Tristar in 2003, a growing network of warehouse parks across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, and eventually an integrated freight-forwarding arm that competed with the largest names in the industry. By the late 2010s, Agility had become one of the developing world's biggest logistics groups. Then it sold the part that made it famous.
Sell the freight arm, keep the map. Agility exited logistics right as the industry consolidated - and became its acquirer's largest outside shareholder.The strategy, in one line
Products & services
The current Agility is best understood as a portfolio. Each business is a leader in an unglamorous, capital-heavy corner of trade - the kind of work that is hard to start, hard to copy, and protected by real estate, regulation or long-term contracts.
The crown jewel of the reinvention is Menzies Aviation, which Agility bought for £763 million in 2022 and merged with its own National Aviation Services unit. If you have flown through a wide range of the world's airports, there is a decent chance your bags passed through Menzies hands. Tristar, meanwhile, moves the fuel that keeps depots, ships and vehicles running across the Middle East, Africa and Asia - by truck, by terminal and by sea.
Then there is Shipa, Agility's digital bet. Shipa Freight lets a small business book ocean and air freight online the way a giant would; Shipa Ecommerce handles cross-border fulfillment; Shipa Delivery runs last-mile in the Gulf. It is the group's answer to a simple question: what happens when the next billion online shoppers live in the exact emerging markets Agility already knows how to operate in?
Customers
Agility's customers rarely see its name on a package, because it usually sits one layer beneath the brands people recognize. Airlines and airports rely on Menzies at the gate. Oil and energy companies hire Tristar to move and store fuel. Multinationals, regional firms and small businesses lease space in its logistics parks - more than a thousand customers in that segment alone - or ship through Shipa. Governments and customs authorities use its Global Clearinghouse Systems arm to modernize borders and trade. Organizations operating in remote or difficult locations lean on GCC Services for catering and camp support. It is, in the plainest terms, a business-to-business infrastructure company.
Why it exists
Global trade in the developed world is a solved problem: dense, digitized, efficient. In the emerging and frontier markets where Agility concentrates, it is not. Warehouses are scarce, fueling a plane or a depot is complicated, customs can be slow, and moving goods the last mile is genuinely hard. That difficulty is the whole point. Margins are widest where operations are hardest, and Agility's edge is decades of experience running exactly the parts of the supply chain that global incumbents find too complicated to bother with.
The biggest opportunities in supply chain aren't in Rotterdam or Long Beach. They're in the places the incumbents find too complicated - and that is precisely where Agility built its map.
Business model
Agility earns money in two ways. First, it operates: ground and cargo handling, fuel transport and storage, warehouse leasing and development, last-mile and e-commerce fulfillment, remote-site services. Second, it invests: it holds minority equity stakes, the largest being its position in DSV, treated as a long-term holding rather than an operating unit. The model resembles a diversified operating group crossed with a patient investor - closer in spirit to a Berkshire Hathaway of logistics than to a single-line freight forwarder.
Differentiation
The obvious rivals - DHL, DSV, Kuehne+Nagel, DB Schenker, DP World, and in aviation services Swissport and dnata - mostly compete inside a single lane. Agility's difference is structural. It is not trying to out-freight the freight forwarders; it exited that fight and kept a stake in the winner. Instead it owns a spread of asset-backed businesses whose moats come from things a price war cannot erode: land, terminals, ground-handling licenses and multi-year contracts. When your competitors are renting the layer you own, you tend to win regardless of who is on top.
Leadership
The reinvention was engineered by people who had lived through the company's entire arc. Tarek Sultan, who led Agility from 1997, is now its Chairman and the architect of those forty-plus acquisitions; he also sits on the board of DSV, a neat symbol of how tangled buyer and seller became. Henadi Al-Saleh serves as Group CEO of Agility Global. Mariam Al-Foudery, based in Singapore, is Group Chief Marketing Officer, leading brand, communications and sustainability. The deep bench is in the operating units - the executives who actually run airport handling, fuel fleets and warehouse development day to day.
Market position
Agility occupies an unusual seat: a Gulf-anchored, globally spread infrastructure investor with operating muscle. In May 2024 it listed Agility Global, its international arm, on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, where the shares opened far above their reference price. The original Kuwait parent kept a controlling stake and, in 2025, rebranded as Makhazen to pursue a Kuwait-focused strategy - a corporate split that can confuse newcomers but simply separates the local business from the global one. Layered on top is a net-zero-by-2045 pledge that is more demanding than most, because it has to decarbonize aviation services and fuel logistics, not just an office estate.
Timeline
Latest
The near-term story is growth and reshuffling. Agility Global reported a resilient first half of 2026, with total assets around US$13.4 billion and Q1 revenue up roughly 23% on the year. A SAR 2.5 billion joint venture with Saudi Arabia's ROSHN will develop a large Grade-A logistics park in Jeddah. Its logistics-parks arm has been adding record warehousing capacity. And reports suggest the group has weighed selling a stake in Tristar - a reminder that in an owner-operator model, the portfolio is never quite finished. Agility keeps buying, building and, when the math favors it, selling.
It is a global owner-operator and investor in the infrastructure of trade: aviation services (Menzies), fuel logistics (Tristar), warehouse and industrial parks, digital logistics (Shipa), remote-site services and customs modernization. It also holds a roughly 8% stake in DSV.
Not as its core business. Agility sold its Global Integrated Logistics freight-forwarding arm to DSV in 2021 in exchange for shares, and now focuses on owning and operating asset-heavy logistics and infrastructure businesses. Its Shipa platform still offers digital freight for SMEs.
It was founded in Kuwait in 1979 as a public warehousing company. Its international group, Agility Global, is headquartered in Abu Dhabi and listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange in 2024.
Tarek Sultan, who led the company from 1997, is Chairman; Henadi Al-Saleh is Group CEO of Agility Global. Mariam Al-Foudery is Group Chief Marketing Officer, leading brand, communications and sustainability.
In logistics and supply chain: DHL, DSV, Kuehne+Nagel, DB Schenker, DP World and GAC. In aviation services, its Menzies unit competes with Swissport and dnata.