Gems Education, one of the world’s biggest private school operators, plans to launch a school for the uber-rich in Abu Dhabi after opening the UAE’s most expensive school in Dubai this year, as the Emirates becomes a magnet for the world’s super-wealthy.
The “significant reallocation of high-income families” into the Arab world’s second-largest economy, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, has been a “very prevalent trend”, which supports the case for another educational institution for this fast-growing segment of the population, Dino Varkey, chief executive of Gems Education, told The National at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh.
Dubai-based Gems, which has owned and operated schools for more than six decades, announced the launch of Gems School of Research and Innovation in Dubai Sports City in January.
The $100-million campus, which features an elevated football field doubling as a helipad, a 600-seat auditorium, an Olympic-size swimming pool and anfor, opened doors in September for the 2025-26 academic year.
Fees at SRI in Dubai range from Dh116,000 ($31,586) for pupils in foundation stage one to Dh206,000 in year 12, making it the most expensive kindergarten to grade-12 educational institution in the country.
The launch of SRI, Mr Varkey said, is a “consequence” of Dubai’s robust economic growth momentum ever since the bounce back from the Covid-driven slowdown accelerated creation of the wealth as well as a sharp rise in super-wealthy migrating to the Emirates.
“We just opened our Gems SRI this September, with just under 500 students on day one. That, for me, is a testament to the maturity that the [affluent] sector is now developing,” Mr Varkey said.
Abu Dhabi benefits largely from the same fundamentals that are driving Dubai’s economic growth, so, “it would certainly be a market that we would look at” for a flagship SRI school.
Gems has historically catered to the affluent as well as dual income households in what “we generally call our premium segment … for decades, frankly”, Mr Varkey said.
“But is there a new catchment of what you would think of as uber affluent families that are relocating to the country? Yes. That's where I think, the Gems School for Research and Innovation is the new flagship of the portfolio.”
There is potential for expanding the flagship SRI brand to markets beyond the UAE, Mr Varkey said.
Following the opening of SRI in Dubai, "we've certainly had enough inbound interest from Abu Dhabi and other places from within the region for effectively a school of research and innovation within those markets, so, we are considering”, he added.
Booming millionaire population
Measures introduced by the UAE to attract foreign investment, combined with its position as a gateway to the broader Middle East, Africa and South Asia, has helped the Emirates attract entrepreneurs, high-net-worth individuals, large family offices, as well as institutional wealth.
The UAE is expected to attract a record 9,800 relocating millionaires this year, drawn by regulatory reforms and a tax-free lifestyle, global advisory Henley & Partners and wealth intelligence firm New World Wealth said in its Wealth Migration Report 2025 released in May.
In Dubai alone, there were an estimated 81,200 millionaires and 20 billionaires, according to the last year’s tally.
Gems, however, will soon face competition in the emerging super-premium school segment. Taleem, a UAE based education provider last year announced it had acquired the rights to own and operate Harrow International Schools across the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait.
The elite UK school's 452-year lineage has royalty and world leaders among alumni and is expected open doors next year.
School operators are not the only businesses looking to capitalise on the influx of uber rich in the UAE. Global financial institutions, private banks and asset managers are also flocking to the country to grab their share of the growing wealth management opportunities. The staff they are relocating to the Emirates is further fulling the growth of high-income households in the country.
The acceleration in wealth creation has pushed the number of millionaires across the UAE to more than 130,000. Personal financial assets in the market have also grown by more than 20 per cent for the past three years to hit more than $700 billion, Dinesh Sharma, HSBC's head of international wealth and premier banking for the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, told The National in September.
HSBC, which inaugurated a dedicated wealth centre for high-net-worth clients in the region this month, expects the number of millionaires to continue growing this year and next. Mr Sharma expects more and more wealthy from established wealth centres, such as China and the UK, to continue moving to the UAE.
Growth ambitions
Though Gems has aspirations to expand SRI as a flagship brand in the UAE and markets beyond, it does not change the overall complexion of the company's owned and managed portfolio of schools. Growing the business across segments remains a priority, Mr Varkey said.
“It is catering to a slightly newer segment, but the broader mix of our growth aspirations, I don't think that's necessarily changed,” he added.
Gems remains on track for aggressive growth across markets, especially in its home base of Dubai and the broader UAE. The education provider, which started with a single school in 1959 in Dubai, saw hyper growth post the pandemic, both in terms of enrolment and revenue.
“We would have been circa 115,000 to 120,000 students at Covid [in the UAE] and circa 150,000 students in the UAE and Qatar [combined]. Do I see us being able to get to about 175,000 to 180,000 students in the next two to three years? Yes, absolutely,” Mr Varkey said.
Admissions on aggregate rose by 5 per cent and revenue by 10 per cent, post pandemic.
“Until 2030, I would expect to do something very, very similar. Could there be elements of the business that significantly outperform those expectations? Yes, it's possible. But if we were as a business compound and grew at 5 per cent on enrolment and 10 per cent on revenue, that's a good place to be in,” he added.
The education provider, which plans to add about 30,000 to 35,000 of new capacity, or number of seats, is on track to achieve the goal, and would probably deliver more capacity than planned within the UAE. However, “what I consider super normal growth post Covid, I would expect that to normalise over the course of the next five years”, Mr Varkey explained.
The UAE’s education sector broadly will also experience a similar normalisation but it will still be growth well into the next decade. As long as the underlying population is growing in the country, school operators can't put up new schools fast enough, according to Mr Varkey.
Initiatives such as Dubai’s D33 agenda will continue to fuel expansion of the sector considering “you need to add another 200,000 school places”, just to keep pace with the economic aspirations of Dubai, Mr Varkey said. “I'm sure that also applies when you consider the plans of Abu Dhabi and the UAE.”
The country, he added, is “very much in an economic ascendancy, so you will need a good quality school available to satisfy the needs of families that are choosing the UAE as a base to build their lives”.
M&A and geographical expansion
The size of the private K-12 market in the UAE is expected to hit $17.35 billion by the end of this decade, from $10.34 billion in 2025, expanding at a compound annual rate of almost 11 per cent over the forecast period, according to a Modor Intelligence report.
The same market in the broader Gulf is projected to rise to $59.24 billion by 2030, from $33.59 billion in 2025, it said.
Over the past 12 to 15 months, Gems Education has made a concerted effort to increase the number of Gems-managed schools in its portfolio and that business vertical will continue to grow, Mr Varkey said.
Currently, most of the company’s portfolio is concentrated in the UAE, followed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UK and a small school in Switzerland.
“There are other markets that would be interesting for us, but at least in the near term, I see the UAE and the border GCC is kind of where we're going to be putting most of our capital to work,” he said.
Within the region, Saudi Arabia, the biggest Arab economy, and the most populous Gulf country, presents the most compelling opportunity after the UAE and that would be “the next relevant adjacent market” for Gems to expand.
As part of its medium-to-long-term strategy, Gems Education is eyeing opportunities in broader South-east Asia, in markets such as Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, he added.
While the company is focused on the organic growth to add more capacity, Mr Varkey did not rule out partnerships and acquisitions as part of the geographic expansion push.
“We've obviously built our reputation, our legacy on building new schools, but to look at acquiring school groups or network of schools is certainly an avenue that's always open to us,” Mr Varkey said.
The company has not done much in terms of mergers and acquisition, but it will increasingly become a bigger part of the expansion effort.
“Perhaps not domestically, but certainly, as we look to diversify this business geographically, it is a very attractive proposition,” he said.
“What I can certainly say is that we are actively looking at opportunities in other markets.”
Shareholder rotation and potential IPO
Even with its aggressive expansion plans, Gems is well-capitalised and does not need funding from banks or other investors, according to Mr Varkey. The company plans to finance its expansion and meet capital investment requirements from its own balance sheet.
Currently, the company does not require “incremental or additive capital from other investor sources”, he said.
In July last year, a Brookfield Asset Management-led consortium of investors including Gulf Islamic Investments, Marathon Asset Management and the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan agreed to invest in Gems Education.
As part of the deal Dubai Islamic Bank also led a $3.25 billion financing facility for Gems, which enabled the company to refinance its existing debt and exit of minority shareholders, the lender said at the time.
“Typically, every shareholder rotation that you undertake, there's always a combination of equity and debt that you need to put in place,” Mr Varkey explained.
The debt and equity deal was a “fully-funded plan, certainly for the next four years” until Gems contemplates “another shareholder rotation”, which typically happens every five years, he said.
A potential initial public offering by Gems is also tied to the shareholder rotation cycle.
“Every single time you consider a shareholder rotation, you naturally need to consider a public markets pathway. It's just one of the options that you always have to evaluate every single time … and then you just take a call," Mr Varkey said, adding that right now is too early in the cycle to consider a public offering.
