The Pearl Merchant of Nattika: How M.A. Yusuff Ali Built Lulu

Step into Lulu Mall Edappally on a Saturday evening and you will feel the gravitational pull of a single idea. More than 80,000 visitors moving through marble corridors, the smell of Arabian shawarma drifting past the Kerala sadya counter, kids screaming on the snow park rides upstairs. This is the cathedral M.A. Yusuff Ali built, and somewhere in that crowd is a man from Nattika who once arrived in Abu Dhabi with nothing more than a small suitcase and a one-way ticket.

A boy from Nattika, a ticket to the Gulf

Yusuff Ali was born in 1955 in Nattika, a quiet coastal stretch in Thrissur district where the Arabian Sea writes the daily weather. His family ran a modest trading business, and like generations of Malayalis before him, the Gulf was less a foreign country than a logical next chapter. In 1973, at just 18, he flew to Abu Dhabi to join his uncle M.K. Abdulla, who ran a small import and distribution outfit catering to the booming oil-economy workforce.

The UAE he landed in was barely two years old as a federation. Sheikh Zayed was still laying the literal pavement of Abu Dhabi. Yusuff Ali spent his twenties stocking shelves, balancing ledgers and learning how migrant communities shopped. By the late 1980s he had taken over the family business. By the 1990s he was ready to rebrand the entire operation.

Why "Lulu"

The name came from Arabic. "Lulu" means pearl, the gem that built the Gulf's pre-oil fortunes from Bahrain to Ras Al Khaimah. It was warm, it was local, it was easy on a Malayali tongue, and it carried the quiet promise of luxury without shouting it. The first proper Lulu Hypermarket opened in Abu Dhabi in the mid-1990s, a then-novel one-stop format borrowing from the European hypermarche playbook but tuned for South Asian, Arab and Filipino families. It worked immediately.

Three decades on, Lulu Group International operates more than 250 stores across 22 countries, runs malls, hotels, food processing plants and import hubs, and turns over more than $7 billion annually. Yusuff Ali's own net worth sits in the $6 to $7 billion range on the Forbes list, depending on the day. He has been chairman of Abu Dhabi's Indian Business Council, sits on the board of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and was awarded the Order of Abu Dhabi by the UAE government. India gave him a Padma Shri in 2008.

The Kochi homecoming

For Yusuff Ali, success in the Gulf was never the finish line. It was the funding round for what he wanted to do back home. In 2013, Lulu Mall opened at Edappally on the eastern edge of Kochi. At 2.5 million square feet of built-up area, it was India's largest mall the day it cut its ribbon, and it instantly reshaped how Malayalis thought about a weekend out. Lulu absorbed the function of the old town square, the cinema, the food court and the supermarket all at once.

He kept building. Lulu International Convention Centre rose in his hometown district of Thrissur, a venue large enough to host national-scale weddings and conferences in a town that had never had infrastructure on that scale. He took a meaningful stake in Cochin International Airport Limited, the world's first fully solar-powered airport and a piece of public infrastructure that Malayalis are proud of. He invested in hotels, hospitals and food parks across the state. In Kochi alone, his footprint is woven into how the city eats, shops, lands and gets married.

The 2021 helicopter crash landing near Panangad

On the morning of 11 April 2021, a helicopter carrying Yusuff Ali and his wife made an emergency landing on a vacant marshy plot near the Kumbalam toll plaza at Panangad, on the southern edge of Kochi. It was raining heavily at the time. Five people were on board, the couple, two pilots and one other passenger. The doors jammed on impact, and four of them had to be lifted out through a window by people who reached the site from the surrounding houses and roadside. Everyone survived. Early reports said nobody was seriously hurt, but Yusuff Ali had in fact sustained spinal injuries, and he was flown to Abu Dhabi where he underwent spinal surgery. In the local telling the landing became a kind of folk story: the billionaire pulled clear by ordinary Kochi people doing what neighbours here have always done.

What Kochi gets right about him

Yusuff Ali is not a flashy figure by Gulf billionaire standards. He still speaks Malayalam in interviews, still visits Nattika, still answers calls from old neighbours. He employs more than 65,000 people globally, a sizeable share of them from Kerala, and his Lulu remittance corridors move money home in ways official statistics never quite capture. In a state that has long exported its labour to the Gulf, he is the rare case of someone who exported himself, built an empire, and then turned the pipe around to flow capital, jobs and ambition back into Kochi. The pearl, in the end, came home.