What Does Licensing Expo Tell Us About Whose Stories Matter?

Licensing Expo 2026 wrapped up a few days ago in Las Vegas with record numbers: 410 exhibiting companies, over 12,500 attendees, and representatives from 78 countries. By every measure, the show is back to its pre-pandemic scale and then some, bigger, broader, and more international than it has been in years.

I was there, as I am every year. And I left with the same question I always leave with.

Walk that floor and you are not just walking through a trade show. You are reading a document. Every brand represented there, whether it is an entertainment franchise, a gaming IP, a food and beverage brand, a lifestyle property, or a sports asset, got there because someone built the infrastructure to take it global. The agent relationships, the retail conversations, the legal frameworks, the category strategies. Somebody did that work.

I walk that floor every year. And every year, I read the same document. North America. Europe. Asia. Latin America. Brands from markets that figured out, decades ago, how to convert cultural and commercial output into global licensing programs. Not just entertainment, food, fashion, gaming, and sports. The full range of what people love and identify with, turned into products that travel. The Arab world is not in that document. Not yet.

This Is Not Just a Business Problem

I want to be precise about what I mean, because this is easy to frame as a missed commercial opportunity and leave it there.

It is that. But it is also something else.

When a child in Cairo grows up with Mickey Mouse on his backpack, or a girl in Riyadh falls asleep under a foreign cartoon character's duvet, they are not just consuming entertainment. They are absorbing, at an early age, a signal about whose imagination travels and whose stays home. About which cultures have stories worth exporting and which do not.

The global licensing industry did not set out to send that message. It built what it had access to, and it scaled what worked. But the result, seen from where I sit, is a system that has consistently reflected back to Arab children a world where their own stories are local and everyone else's are universal.

The Infrastructure Was Always the Missing Piece

Here is what I have come to understand after years working in this space: the absence of Arab brands from the global licensing market was never really about content quality or audience size.

Osratouna TV has 21 million subscribers and 20 billion views. By any measure, that is a global audience. Thaloob, their flagship character, is beloved by Arabic-speaking children across dozens of countries. The audience was always there. What was missing was the infrastructure to convert that audience into a global licensing program. The agent relationships, the legal frameworks, and the knowledge of how retail conversations work in markets you have never entered before.

That infrastructure is not something you build overnight. It requires people who sit at the intersection of two worlds and understand both.

That has been the gap. And it is the gap I am working to close.

What Changes When Arab Brands Go Global

The brands that succeed in building global licensing programs from this region will do something beyond generating revenue. They will be the first proof that Arabic stories travel. That matters more than any single deal.

Because once the proof exists, the second brand has an easier path. And the third. The industry takes its cues from precedent. Right now, the precedent says Arab IP stays regional. Every brand that breaks that assumption rewrites the document I walk past every year at Licensing Expo.

I think about this often. The brands we work to bring to the global stage are not just commercial projects. They are an argument. An argument that the 400 million people in the Arab world, and the hundreds of millions more who speak Arabic and grow up on its stories, deserve to see their culture reflected back to them from the shelves of stores in London, Paris, and São Paulo.

That is the work. It is slow, structural work. But it is the right work to be doing.