Platform Competition at the Gulf’s Doorstep: Keeta’s Entry into the GCC and the Reconfiguration of Food-Delivery Power

Authors: Walid Ahmad, Hassan Aref

Affiliation: King Abdulaziz University

Published in U7Y Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2025

https://doi.org/10.65326/u7y566748

© 2025 U7Y Journal | Licensed under CC BY 4.0

Platform Competition at the Gulf’s Doorstep_ Keeta’s Entry into the GCC and the Reconfigur.

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Abstract

This article examines a fast-moving development in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) digital economy: the arrival and rapid scaling of Keeta, an international food-delivery platform, alongside visible shifts in pricing and promotional tactics by incumbent rivals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and neighboring markets. Drawing on theories of two-sided platforms, Bourdieu’s forms of capital, world-systems analysis, and institutional isomorphism, the paper frames Keeta’s expansion as a strategic market-entry maneuver that triggers defensive price and product responses, accelerates innovation adoption (e.g., last-mile automation), and pressures value distribution among consumers, couriers, and merchants. Methodologically, the study synthesizes contemporary reports and secondary data with established scholarly frameworks to generate a theory-informed interpretation suitable for managerial and policy decision-making. The article proposes measurable indicators for tracking competitive intensity and sustainability, outlines scenarios for the next 12–24 months, and concludes with recommendations for regulators, platforms, and merchants.

Keywords: GCC digital economy; food delivery; platform competition; pricing strategy; institutional isomorphism; Bourdieu; world-systems

1. Introduction

The GCC’s food-delivery sector has evolved into a sophisticated, data-driven marketplace where user acquisition, logistics efficiency, and partner economics determine competitive advantage. Keeta’s entrance into the region—coupled with announcements of major investment, local headquarters, and large-scale onboarding of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)—marks a shift from a relatively stable oligopoly to a more volatile, innovation-intensive rivalry. Incumbents such as Talabat and Noon have, in turn, amplified promotions, loyalty features, and service enhancements—a pattern consistent with strategic retaliation in two-sided markets.

This paper addresses three questions. First, how should Keeta’s strategy be understood through the lens of platform economics and critical sociology? Second, what kinds of organizational and field-level pressures explain the observable surge in offers and price-based competition? Third, what are the likely consequences for consumers, riders, restaurants, and regulators across the GCC over the short to medium term? By combining established theory with current developments, the article offers a structured reading of a dynamic competitive episode in the Gulf’s broader digitalization story.

2. Literature Review and Analytical Lenses

2.1 Two-Sided Platforms and Network Effects

Foundational models of two-sided markets emphasize cross-group externalities: user growth on one side (consumers) increases value for the other side (restaurants and couriers), and vice versa. Platforms often subsidize participation—via discounts, free delivery, or lower commissions—to accelerate network formation. Once scale is achieved, platforms may pivot toward monetization, but the timing is delicate; premature monetization can stall network growth, while sustained subsidies can compress margins. In food delivery, switching costs are modest and multi-homing is common, intensifying the need for continual engagement and price signaling.

2.2 Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital in Platform Competition

Bourdieu’s framework distinguishes economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital:

• Economic capital: The financial capacity to fund user subsidies, restaurant onboarding, and technology. New entrants leverage deep capital pools to sustain aggressive pricing and promotions in early phases.

• Cultural capital: Logistics algorithms, user-experience design, and operational know-how travel as codified processes and expert teams. A platform’s “way of doing things” is a strategic asset.

• Social capital: Dense ties with restaurants, couriers, regulators, and city authorities. Incumbents possess embedded relationships; entrants must assemble them quickly, often via vendor programs and local partnerships.

• Symbolic capital: The prestige of being perceived as innovative, fast, and customer-centric. In GCC cities that valorize speed, scale, and service excellence, symbolic capital is unusually consequential for adoption curves.

By converting economic capital into the other forms, a challenger can compress the time needed to reach credible scale. The incumbents’ counter-moves—escalating offers, enhancing loyalty programs, highlighting reliability—can be read as attempts to defend and re-valorize their accumulated capitals.

2.3 World-Systems Theory: GCC as a Strategic Gateway

World-systems analysis divides the global economy into core, semi-periphery, and periphery. The GCC functions as a high-income gateway with world-class infrastructure, making it an attractive node for multinational platforms. Entry into such nodes has ripple effects: standards are set in the gateway market, then diffused across neighboring ecosystems. In this reading, Keeta’s GCC push is not merely a regional play; it is a bid to establish a prestige foothold in a “core-adjacent” system whose regulatory predictability and consumer purchasing power can seed further international expansion.

2.4 Institutional Isomorphism in a Fast-Follower Arena

DiMaggio and Powell describe coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism:

• Coercive pressures arise from regulation—labor rules, safety standards (including for drones), and consumer protection—pushing platforms toward similar compliance regimes.

• Mimetic pressures emerge under uncertainty: firms imitate successful rivals’ promotions or service features, leading to convergent pricing calendars and UX patterns.

• Normative pressures reflect professional norms—data science methods, platform risk dashboards, and logistics KPIs—that diffuse through shared labor markets and vendor communities.

The visible flurry of offers and the rapid adoption of similar features across competitors are consistent with mimetic isomorphism catalyzed by a high-profile entrant.

3. Context: The GCC Food-Delivery Field

The GCC combines dense urban corridors, high smartphone penetration, and demand for convenience services. Food delivery sits at the intersection of consumer lifestyle, hospitality supply chains, and urban policy. Over the last several years, leading platforms in the UAE have consolidated market share and standardized operational practices. Into this environment, Keeta’s move—establishing a local base, committing to job creation, onboarding thousands of SMEs, and signaling logistics innovation—functions as a strategic shock that reshapes expectations among consumers, restaurants, and riders.

4. Method and Approach

The study deploys a qualitative synthesis of timely reports and secondary data interpreted through established theories in platform economics and critical sociology. While proprietary financials are unavailable, triangulation across multiple recent accounts, app-store update narratives, and public statements supports a coherent, theory-consistent storyline. The goal is not to estimate precise elasticities but to produce a practically useful, theoretically grounded map of the competitive dynamics now unfolding.

5. Keeta’s Strategic Playbook in the GCC

5.1 Commitment Signals and Local Embedding

Announcing a regional headquarters, job creation, and SME onboarding serves as a credible commitment to the market. In platform competition, a strong commitment deters rivals from assuming the entrant will retreat once subsidies taper. The promise of onboarding thousands of SMEs does double duty: it expands the restaurant universe for consumers and reduces switching frictions for merchants by offering vendor-friendly terms, marketing credits, and technology support.

5.2 Subsidy Architecture and User Acquisition

The initial phase often centers on consumer-side subsidies (e.g., launch discounts, free delivery periods) and merchant-side subsidies (e.g., reduced commissions, onboarding incentives). These are not merely marketing expenses; they are network-formation instruments. The short-term aim is to alter user habits—install the app, place the first order, experience reliability—and to encourage restaurants to multi-home or list preferentially.

5.3 Logistics and Symbolic Capital

Trials of advanced last-mile options, such as drones and autonomous vehicles where permissible, signal technological seriousness and help craft an identity of speed and efficiency. Symbolically, innovation showcases align neatly with the GCC’s established reputation for early adoption of smart-city technologies. This enhances symbolic capital, attracting consumers who value novelty and merchants who value operational reliability.

6. Incumbent Response: Pricing, Offers, and Differentiation

6.1 The Price-Promotion Escalation

A new entrant’s subsidy strategy puts incumbents on the defensive. In food delivery, marginal switching costs are low and consumers are promotion-sensitive. Hence, an uptick in vouchers, free-delivery windows, and “percentage-off” events emerges as a rational, near-term response. This is classic mimetic isomorphism: match the calendar and magnitude of competitors’ offers to reduce churn.

6.2 Beyond Price: Service Layers and Retention

Price is the attention trigger; service quality is the retention engine. Incumbents can counter via guaranteed delivery windows, tighter on-time metrics, loyalty tiers, and wider non-restaurant assortments (groceries, pharmacies, flowers). Expanding category breadth improves the consumer lifetime value equation, offsetting promotional burn with basket-mix advantages.

6.3 Merchant Economics and Multi-Homing

Merchants are pivotal in two-sided markets. Lower commissions and promotional slots function as merchant-side subsidies. Over time, incumbents may recalibrate fee schedules, provide data dashboards, or offer “founding partner” badges to protect exclusive relationships with high-volume brands. The practical outcome is multi-homing: restaurants list on several platforms while pushing their own direct channels. The bargaining power of restaurants rises when platforms compete, but only if they can read and negotiate terms intelligently.

7. A Field Theory of Gulf Food Delivery

7.1 Bourdieu Revisited: Capital Conversion Cycles

Keeta’s entry shows how economic capital funds introductory discounts that manufacture social capital (merchant networks, courier pools) and symbolic capital (buzz, “top downloads,” innovation aura). Incumbents reply by mobilizing their accumulated cultural capital—local operational knowledge, established CX patterns—to keep service reliability high during promotion spikes. Whichever side can convert capitals most efficiently into daily user satisfaction gains tends to win the medium run.

7.2 World-Systems Framing: Gateways and Demonstrations

Because the UAE functions as a regional demonstration market, wins in the UAE carry diffusion power. Merchant playbooks, UX patterns, and discount tactics tested in Dubai or Abu Dhabi are quickly replicated in other GCC cities. A successful UAE foothold can become the template for Bahrain, Oman, or further expansions, creating a gateway effect that reduces subsequent entry costs.

7.3 Institutional Isomorphism: Why Everyone Looks the Same

Under uncertainty, platforms copy one another’s most visible, low-risk tactics: banner placements, “first order 50% off,” free-delivery weekends, and push-notification cadences. These tactics homogenize the field and make symbolic capital decisive; the platform that narrates the most future-leaning vision (speed, drones, AI routing, small-business enablement) may achieve brand distinctiveness even when offers converge.

8. Stakeholder Impacts

8.1 Consumers

In the near term, consumers benefit from lower effective prices and wider choice. However, promotion-driven cycles can also increase choice overload and notification fatigue. If price wars persist, surge fees or higher post-promotion prices may appear later to normalize margins. The sustainability question for consumers is whether the new equilibrium produces durable value (reliability, faster delivery, better coverage) beyond temporary discounts.

8.2 Couriers

Couriers experience competing pressures. On the positive side, high order volumes can raise earnings opportunities and stabilize shift scheduling. On the negative side, tight on-time targets, algorithmic dispatching, and dense competition may compress per-order payouts. The vector of change depends on how platforms balance utilization (orders per hour) with fairness (compensation schemes, safety protocols, heat-management in hot months).

8.3 Restaurants and SMEs

For restaurants, multi-homing plus intensified platform competition can temporarily improve negotiating leverage—reduced commissions during launch windows, subsidized marketing, and better data access. Yet dependence on marketplaces can deepen if direct channels languish. Savvy operators will use the window of platform competition to build owned loyalty (first-party CRM, menu engineering, off-platform bundles) while leveraging marketplace traffic.

8.4 Regulators and Cities

Urban authorities face a trilemma: encourage innovation, protect workers and consumers, and keep streets, sidewalks, and airspace safe. As last-mile technologies evolve, regulators must calibrate coercive isomorphism—clear rules on licensing, drone operations, and rider safety—to ensure a level field without stifling beneficial experimentation. Data-sharing agreements (e.g., on delivery traffic and emissions) can align platform incentives with city sustainability goals.

9. Measuring the Competition: A Practical Dashboard

To move beyond anecdotes, stakeholders can monitor a compact set of indicators:

1. Effective Price Index (EPI): Average basket value minus discounts and free-delivery credits; tracked weekly by city and cuisine.

2. Promotion Intensity Ratio (PIR): Count and depth of live offers per user per week; correlates with churn suppression tactics.

3. On-Time Reliability (OTR): Share of orders delivered within the promised window; essential for retention.

4. Merchant Multi-Homing Rate (MMR): Share of top-100 restaurants listed on three or more platforms; proxy for bargaining power.

5. Courier Utilization (CU): Orders per hour adjusted for wait time; linked to earnings stability and safety stress.

6. Assortment Breadth (AB): Unique active restaurants and non-restaurant categories; a measure of consumer choice expansion.

7. Innovation Adoption Score (IAS): Presence and scale of new last-mile options (e.g., drones, autonomous delivery), plus pilot-to-rollout velocity.

A rising EPI with flat PIR indicates healthier monetization; a falling EPI with rising PIR may signal escalating price pressure. Regulators can focus on CU and safety metrics; merchants on MMR and AB; platforms on OTR and IAS.

10. Scenarios (12–24 Months)

Scenario A: Disciplined Coexistence

Promotions converge at sustainable levels, with platforms differentiating through reliability, category breadth, and loyalty ecosystems. Consumers enjoy moderate discounts plus better service guarantees. Merchants benefit from stable multi-homing economics. This is the most socially efficient outcome and likely if regulators signal expectations around fair competition and worker protections.

Scenario B: Promotion Arms Race

One or more players prioritize share over margin, pushing deep, frequent discounts. Short-term consumer surplus rises sharply; mid-term risks include fee creep, rider strain, and merchant dissatisfaction if commission relief is uneven. Unless financed by patient capital, the arms race is typically self-limiting.

Scenario C: Technological Leapfrogging

A decisive move in last-mile automation or AI dispatch drives a structural cost advantage for one platform. Price leadership then derives less from subsidies and more from genuine productivity gains. Cities become partners in scaling safe automation protocols, and the winning model diffuses quickly across the GCC.

11. Managerial Implications

11.1 For Platforms (Entrants and Incumbents)

• Move beyond blanket subsidies. Use predictive analytics to target discounts where elasticity is highest. Tie offers to loyalty tiers rather than standalone vouchers.

• Invest in symbolic capital. Communicate a clear vision—speed, responsibility, and SME enablement—that differentiates even when prices are similar.

• Deepen merchant tooling. Transparent dashboards, A/B-tested menu placements, and co-funded campaigns increase merchant stickiness without raising nominal commission rates.

• Protect riders. Heat-risk protocols, fair-pay floors, and transparent dispatch rules reduce operational friction and reputational risk.

11.2 For Restaurants and SMEs

• Negotiate with data. Track effective commission after promos and co-marketing credits; negotiate volume-based tiers and banner placements.

• Build first-party loyalty. Use marketplace exposure to seed owned channels—QR codes in bags, bounce-back offers, and loyalty stamps that travel off-platform.

• Engineer the menu. Smaller, faster-preparation menus reduce cancellations and improve on-time performance, which platforms reward algorithmically.

11.3 For Policymakers and City Managers

• Set transparent guardrails. Clear standards on rider safety, insurance, and drone corridors reduce uncertainty and support responsible scaling.

• Encourage fair competition. Monitor predatory pricing patterns while allowing consumer-beneficial promotion cycles.

• Align with sustainability goals. Incentivize low-emission fleets and data-sharing to manage congestion and emissions.

12. Theoretical Contribution

By blending platform economics with Bourdieu’s capital theory, world-systems positioning, and institutional isomorphism, the article demonstrates how corporate strategy and social structure co-produce market outcomes. Keeta’s arrival can be read as a moment where capital conversion (economic → social/symbolic), gateway dynamics (UAE as demonstration market), and field convergence (mimetic pricing) interact to rewrite the rules of engagement. The framework generalizes to other GCC platform arenas (e-grocery, quick commerce, mobility) where new entrants with deep capital and advanced logistics attempt rapid scale.

13. Limitations and Future Research

The analysis relies on secondary reporting and observable market signals; confidential unit-economics and long-term contract terms are unknown. Future studies should incorporate merchant surveys, rider earnings panels, and transaction-level price tracking to quantify elasticity, retention, and welfare effects. Comparative studies across GCC cities could test how regulatory and infrastructural differences mediate the speed of isomorphic convergence and the durability of symbolic capital advantages.

14. Conclusion

Keeta’s GCC push has catalyzed a visible re-pricing and re-positioning among food-delivery platforms in the UAE and neighboring markets. The early stage is dominated by promotions and commitments that build network mass; the next stage will hinge on operational excellence, merchant empowerment, and credible innovation. Bourdieu helps us see how different forms of capital are mobilized and converted; world-systems analysis situates the UAE as a gateway whose outcomes carry outsized signaling power; institutional isomorphism explains why rival offers start to look alike. For consumers, the near-term is a win; for merchants and riders, the opportunity is real but requires strategic navigation. For platforms, discipline, differentiation, and responsible scaling will separate transient hype from durable leadership.

Hashtags

#GCCFoodDelivery #PlatformCompetition #DigitalEconomyUAE #PricingStrategy #LogisticsInnovation #SMEGrowth #UrbanTech

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