Talabat has appointed Moaiad Aqel as managing director of its Qatar business, the Dubai-listed delivery and quick commerce group confirmed on 12 October 2026. He is promoted from the equivalent role in Bahrain and returns to a market he has worked in before.
Aqel has been with talabat for more than a decade. He led the company's Bahrain operation from 2022, and before that spent more than three years in Doha as director of sales for talabat Qatar, which is the period he was referring to when he described Qatar in the announcement as a market he knows well. Earlier still he ran account management for talabat in Saudi Arabia. In total he brings more than eighteen years across food delivery, e-commerce, hospitality, sales and business growth.
No predecessor is named in the announcement, and the company has not said who previously held the Qatar role.
The appointment reads differently when it is set beside what talabat announced on the same day in Kuwait, where it named Noor Al-Bahar, previously of Dabdoob, as managing director. Two country leaders confirmed in a single day is not coincidence. Both seats sit beneath a group role that did not exist at the start of the year.
In April talabat created the position of chief international officer and appointed Bader Al-Ghanim to it, the first time the company had held that role. Al-Ghanim had been managing director in Kuwait, so his promotion vacated that seat directly, and the two country appointments announced this month fill out the layer of management reporting into him. He is the quoted group voice in both announcements.
Commenting on the Qatar appointment, Al-Ghanim said that developing leaders from within is an important part of how talabat builds for the future. That framing fits the two moves taken together: one market filled by an internal promotion of a long-serving country manager, the other by an external hire from a regional competitor.
Talabat describes itself as the leading everyday app in the Middle East and North Africa. It operates in the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and Kuwait, and its shares are listed in Dubai. Since the listing the company has been under the kind of disclosure and performance scrutiny that comes with public markets, and the country managing director is the role that carries profitability and competitive position in each individual market.
Qatar is a smaller market than the group's largest by population, but it is a dense, high income one in which food delivery penetration is high and competition is concentrated among a handful of platforms. A managing director there is running the full local business rather than a function, which is what makes the seat a genuine top-of-house appointment for that market rather than a regional support role.
The company did not issue the Qatar announcement through the newswire channel it used for the Kuwait appointment, and no release has been published on talabat's own newsroom. The appointment was confirmed through local coverage in Doha and through company-supplied copy placed with a Qatari title.
