Saudi’s MBC acquires 14% stake in Spotify rival Anghami

Shares in the Middle East’s biggest streaming service, Anghami, have jumped over 80 per cent on the Nasdaq in the last five trading days amid revelations that Saudi Arabian media giant MBC has acquired 13.7 per cent of the total ordinary shares of the company.

A filing from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicates that MBC Group, through its MBC Ventures arm, has purchased 4,074,533 ordinary shares in Anghami.

Before revelations of the SEC filing, Anghami’s share price on the Nasdaq was hovering around just under the $1 mark last week Friday, but at the close of trade on Thursday this week, the share price was up $1.81, meaning that the stock has risen at least 86 per cent in a week. Anghami listed on the Nasdaq in February 2022.

This also means that MBC’s stake in Anghami stands at $7.3m as of Friday morning. MBC is the biggest broadcaster in the Middle East as it operates 13 free-to-air TV channels and also runs its own Netflix-style streaming service Shahid. In January this year, MBC floated 10 per cent of its share capital on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul stock exchange.

MENA’s answer to Spotify

Anghami was launched in Beirut, Lebanon in 2012, but since 2021 it has been headquartered in Abu Dhabi while it also has offices in Beirut, Cairo and Riyadh with more than 160 employees. The company has grown into a streaming giant with more than 70 million users in the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and the US.

Tech pundits have described it as the answer to Spotify in the Middle East. In terms of its business model, Anghami describes itself as a “freemium service that allows users to play millions of international and Arabic songs for free.” Meanwhile, it also has a subscription model where paid users of Anghami Plus are granted access to an array of features that allow them to download songs, play music offline, view lyrics, rewind, scrub, and repeat all the music they want.