News

4Sale Achieves Remarkable 2023 Sales Volume Increases

The Kuwaiti online classifieds platform is now focused on hyper-personalization and infrastructure upgrades amid ambitious plans for 2024.

Published

3 years ago

January 23, 2024

Nour Nasir

4sale achieves remarkable 2023 sales volume increases

4Sale, Kuwait’s prominent online classifieds platform, has announced its exceptional growth in 2023, along with heightened activity across all of its 197 categories. The ongoing trend of consumers shifting towards online transactions rather than cash payments has continued to flourish, with over 90% of the company’s sales occurring online in 2023, a significant increase from the 65% recorded in 2019.

2024 should see continued growth for the classifieds platform as the company focuses on refining and enhancing its search capabilities. A major strategic endeavor will involve the implementation of hyper-personalized recommendations for customers, enabling the optimization of strategies for holidays and major commercial events. To achieve this, 4Sale will employ data collection and analysis techniques similar to those of Google and Facebook.

Furthermore, this year will see a significant upscaling of the company’s infrastructure to accommodate its rapid growth trajectory. The goal is to reach two million monthly active users by 2025, a substantial market share in a country of just five million people.

Tarek Sakr, Chief Executive Officer of 4Sale, expressed his enthusiasm for the outstanding 2023 performance and emphasized the company’s ambitions to enhance customer experiences in the coming year. “While a market leader, 4Sale’s ambition remains undimmed; we want everything we do to be bigger and faster, easier and more personalized for customers, with maximum choice […] I look forward to next year with confidence and excitement”.

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Meanwhile, Nabil Mohamed, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer of 4Sale, highlighted the company’s commitment to hyper-personalization and technological advancements that aim to transform sporadic purchases into daily habits. “We are committed to delivering an enhanced user experience and embracing technological advancements for the benefit of our users. Our goal is to offer highly relevant recommendations and truly beneficial features”.

As part of the ongoing infrastructure upgrades, 4Sale is investing in more efficient technologies to streamline website and backend operations in a bid to enhance performance and data-handling capabilities.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.