Channel Summit META 2025 Celebrates Excellence in Consumer Tech with Prestigious Awards Ceremony

Channel Summit META 2025 concluded with a dynamic awards ceremony at the Fairmont Bab Al Bahr in Abu Dhabi, honoring outstanding achievements in the consumer technology sector across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa. The event brought together nearly 500 senior decision-makers from leading tech retailers and distributors for 1.5 days of curated meetings, keynotes, and networking, culminating in this celebration of the channel’s top performers.

Recognizing Innovation and Leadership

The annual awards program highlighted exceptional performance across various categories, including vendor excellence, distribution prowess, executive leadership, product launches, and sustainability initiatives. Winners were determined through live voting by participating retail buyers, ensuring that the accolades reflected genuine market impact and business potential.

Award Categories and Winners

• Best Vendor 2025

  • Appliance & Smart Home: Karcher

  • Audio & Entertainment: Canon

  • IT Peripherals & Computing: Hama

  • Lifestyle: Yango Yasmina

  • Mobile Products: Nothing

• Best Distributor 2025

  • Broadline: Oskar

  • Lifestyle: Lime Concepts and Shift (joint winners)

• Retail Executive of the Year 2025

  • Bahrain: Prince Mathew, Sharaf DG

  • Kuwait: Girish Kayanadath, Best Yousifi, & Babu Wasim, Lulu (joint winners)

  • Oman: Pradeep Kumar Dwivedi, Sharaf DG

  • Qatar: Sibi Karthikeyan, Lulu

  • Saudi Arabia: Babu Francis Tharakan, Lulu

  • UAE: Khaled Abbas, Carrefour & Sham Sunder, Emax (joint winners)

• Best Product Launch 2025

  • Mobile Products: Jumbo for Nothing (3a) series on Jumbo Souq

  • IT & Computing: Sharaf DG for their Copilot+ PC launch

  • Home: Tornado for their 90cm cooker launch

  • Entertainment (Audio, Video, Gaming, Lifestyle): Store 974 for their Aorus Master gaming laptops

• Circular Initiative 2025

  • Best Al Yousufi, Kuwait: The Best Renewal Hub (BRH)

Celebrating Longstanding Partnerships

This year’s event also acknowledged the enduring relationships that have underpinned the success of Channel Summit META and its predecessor, DISTREE. Many attendees, sponsors, and partners have been part of this community for over two decades, supporting the original format and now championing its evolution into the modern Channel Summit platform.

Looking Ahead

Channel Summit META 2025 closed with close to 2000 scheduled and on-site one-on-one meetings, supported by headline sponsors Nothing, Hama, Lime Concepts, Yango, and Oskar. The event also featured presentations from Livebuy, Microsoft, GfK, and CONTEXT, alongside the launch of the Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro and the release of a whitepaper by ChannelHub and Bellamy Alden on AI sales challenges in electronics retail.