Tamara turned a profit, but the real story is how

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Hi friends! 👋

Last week, a post popped up on my feed claiming record profits for Saudi’s two BNPL poster children: Tabby and Tamara. I paused. Neither company had publicly released earnings before, let alone anything approaching a line-item financial statement. 

So where was this coming from? I started digging.

The original claim traced back to Saudi news site, Aleqt. After some rudimentary translation, I still couldn’t identify a clear source for the numbers. No documents, no filings, just the headline and unsubstantiated figures.

Cue some more frantic Googling, before eventually just checking Tamara’s website. And lo and behold, there it was, quietly published: an IFRS-compliant Q1 2025 financial report, reviewed by PwC in accordance with IAS 34 and ISRE 2410.

In other words, this puts Tamara’s disclosures several rungs above the typical regional startup earnings blog post. Unfortunately, no such luck for Tabby, so this deep dive focuses exclusively on Tamara. And what the numbers reveal is far more layered than what the sweeping headlines that brought the results in question to our attention might suggest.

Yes, the company posted a Q1 profit, but a closer read shows that profitability came with caveats. A closer look reveals questions around credit transparency, margin durability, and the engine behind its earnings.

But perhaps even more interesting than what Tamara earned in Q1 is how under the hood, there’s a quiet but significant re-architecture underway, one that, to borrow from Robert Frost, takes the road less travelled compared to both regional and global BNPL peers.

Here’s what Tamara’s numbers do, and don’t, tell us 👇

Yes, Tamara turned a profit in Q1…

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