Kasada targets first North Africa hotel deal
ABU DHABI: Kasada Capital Management, a private equity firm backed by Qatar's US$524bil sovereign wealth fund, expects to strike a hotel deal in Morocco in the first half of 2026, marking its entry into North Africa's booming hospitality and tourism industry.
The hospitality-focused firm, whose backers include the Qatar Investment Authority and French hotel group Accor SA, has set up an office in Casablanca to assess opportunities and aims to close a fund for investments in Morocco by the end of the year.
The North African Kingdom received 17.4 million tourists last year. That eclipsed Egypt as the most visited country in Africa.
The country is expected to draw soccer fans from all over the world when it holds the Africa Cup of Nations tournament in 2025-26, and co-hosts the FIFA World Cup with Spain and Portugal in 2030.
'North Africa is a priority for us,' Olivier Granet, Kasada's managing partner and co-chief executive officer, said in an interview.
'Morocco is, today, the number one tourism destination on the African continent,' Granet said. 'And, for us, to become the leading platform we have to become pan- African.'
Kasada has focused on sub-Saharan Africa since closing its first fund of about US$500mil in 2019.
Its portfolio of 19 hotels across seven countries in the region include South Africa's iconic Cape Grace as well as upscale Pullman-branded properties in major cities in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Senegal.
Africa is a burgeoning market for travel driven by strong economic growth, an expanding middle class, increasing consumer-spending power and growing air connectivity.
It was the best-performing tourism region in the world in 2024 after the Middle East, with foreign arrivals 7% above pre-pandemic levels, according to the United Nations tourism agency.
Kasada's ambitions for Morocco dovetail with its plans to grow its portfolio across the budget and luxury hotel segments in key cities in sub-Saharan Africa, while balancing the revenue earned from letting out rooms with that from its food and beverage, co-working and events offerings.
'The African continent is, frankly, enormous but the penetration levels are still fairly low,' said David Damiba, Kasada's managing partner and co-chief executive officer.
'We think that there's scope to increase the scale of what we've built already by a factor of two to three times fairly easily in these markets while being concentrated to take advantage of our scale in core cities.' — Bloomberg
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