United International Transportation Company (Budget Saudi)

The scale case, and it is a real one. SAR 2.4B of revenue is 43.3% of the sector, on the largest fleet and the widest branch network of the three. It turns that into 9.9% on invested capital costing 9.7%, a margin of +0.2pt, and it has cleared that hurdle in all 8 years covered here, which is a longer run than either of the others has accounts for.

The reported margins look like the weakest in the sector and are not. Gross margin of 50.7% and EBITDA margin of 41.8% are both the lowest of the three, but Budget Saudi runs much the largest used-car trade here, and disposal revenue booked at a few points of margin drags a blended margin down without touching the business underneath it. Charge the whole company for its vehicles and the ranking inverts: net margin of 14.1% is the highest of the three.

The balance sheet is the argument. Debt to equity of 0.58x against a sector median of 1.13x, interest covered 9.4x over, and revenue growth of +22.7%, the fastest here. Two things sit against it. Receivables of 130 days are the longest in the sector and have lengthened in each of the last three years, and the payout of 34.3% of net profit is being made while the fleet is still being built.

Budget Saudi bought scale, and bought it late. Its fleet ran between 26,000 and 36,000 vehicles for six years and then went to 53,526 in 2024 and 59,095 in 2025. That is the largest fleet in the sector and 43% of the vehicles the three have on the road between them.

It paid for that with the balance sheet it had spent those six years keeping clean. Debt was SAR 25.5M at the end of 2021 and SAR 1.72B at the end of 2025, and it is still the least leveraged of the three by a wide margin. That is the point rather than an aside: the company that waited is the one that had room to move when it decided to.

It distributes roughly a third of earnings, the middle of the three, and the dividend per share in 2025 is what it was in 2018, at SAR 1.50, on revenue that has more than doubled in between. That is a company financing its growth out of retained profit and its own borrowing capacity rather than out of shareholders' patience.

The line to keep an eye on is the receivable. At 130 days it is the longest in the sector and it has risen in each of the last three years, on a lease book growing faster than anything else in the company. Neither of those is a problem on its own, and they are the same fact.

Of what it earned in FY2025, Budget Saudi declared SAR 1.50 a share, 34.3% of net profit, against free cash flow of SAR 92.5M. In this sector the free cash flow figure is not the test it looks like: a fleet business shows a negative one while it is buying vehicles faster than it retires them, which is growth rather than distress. Read it beside the fleet count, not on its own.