News

eCommerce Fashion Platform Namshi Acquired By Noon

The deal worth $335 million will consolidate the region’s eCommerce market by bringing together two of the largest online retailers.

Published

4 years ago

August 22, 2022

Nour Nasir

Noon

Emaar, Dubai’s premiere real estate developer, has revealed that it will be selling off ownership rights to the eCommerce fashion platform Namshi, which it has owned outright since 2019, after purchasing a 51% stake back in 2017.

Namshi is being acquired by rival company Noon, who will pay $335.2 million for the acquisition, a price set by an independent valuer and approved via Dubai’s Securities & Commodities Authority. The figure represents a hefty profit for Emaar, who paid $281 in total for full ownership of the company.

“The company would like to announce that its board of directors has, in principle, approved the sale of Namshi to Noon (subject to the approval of the Noon board of directors). Detailed information will be disclosed once the approval of Noon’s board is received formally,” says Ahmad Thani Rashed Al Matrooshi, board member at Emaar.

Also Read: UAE Startup Dukkantek Raises $10 Million In Funding

The move will considerably consolidate the region’s eCommerce space, as Noon and Namshi are two of the biggest online retailers in the United Arab Emirates, with shopping giant Amazon taking the top spot.

Noon was founded in 2017 by Mohamed Alabbar, the founder of Emaar properties, along with help from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The sale is the second major investment switch for Emaar, who recently bought a stake in the Dubai Creek Harbour development for a massive $2 billion.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.