By Sumanta Dey | BENGALURU BENGALURU After Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the U.S. presidential election, investors may refocus in the coming week on the health of the world economy and any signs that years of rock-bottom interest rates and fiscal austerity are coming to an end. Trump’s victory poses a major challenge to the conventional wisdom on the global economy, which for years has relied on […]
By Yashaswini Swamynathan U.S. stock index futures fell sharply on Friday as investors tailored their portfolios to benefit from president-elect Donald Trump’s proposed policies. The decline on Nasdaq futures was more pronounced. Facebook (FB.O), Apple (AAPL.O), Netflix (NFLX.O) and Alphabet (GOOGL.O) were off more than 1 percent in premarket trading, indicating that Thursday’s selloff in the technology sector was likely to continue. Investors also appeared to be […]
By David Randall | NEW YORK NEW YORK Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the U.S. presidential race is pushing mutual fund managers out of dividend stocks and into the shares of financial, industrial and materials companies that stand to benefit from rising inflation. Although inflation remains subdued by most measures, U.S. longer-dated Treasury yields rose on Thursday to their highest levels in more than 10 months after […]
ABU DHABI // Mass extinction of species, how to boost economic growth without harming the planet and the effects of mass agriculture are all issues to be addressed at the Cop 22 summit. The meeting in Morocco, which began this week, follows last year’s Paris Agreement, where 196 countries committed to reducing global warming to less than 2°C. One of the major discussion points is that the […]
UAE. In the GCC, healthcare, industrials & materials and financial services have recorded the largest fluctuations in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, despite the gradual decline witnessed by the industry since 2014. According to research published today in The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) 2016 M&A Report, Masters of the Corporate Portfolio, companies that regularly acquire and divest businesses as part of their corporate strategy consistently outperform less […]
ABU DHABI // Abu Dhabi’s environment agency insisted that it carries out strict monitoring of water quality, after a UAE University study suggested industry in Mussaffah was causing pollution that could harm the area’s marine ecology. Scientists at UAE University had discovered that some metals were several times more common in samples collected close to industry compared with those taken from farther away. The Environment Agency Abu […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has confirmed that the ACWA Power and Harbin Electric consortium has begun construction of the 2,400 megawatt (MW) Hassyan clean coal power station, based on the Independent Power Producer (IPP) procurement model.The plant will be the first-of-its-kind in the region and is fully-compliant with set international standards, adopting the use of ultra-supercritical technology. In June, DEWA and the […]
AJMAN // A fabrics warehouse caught fire in Ajman industrial area on Tuesday afternoon. No injuries were reported in the blaze and the firefighters prevented it from spreading to nearby warehouses, said Col Nasser Al Zari, director of media and public relations at Ajman Civil Defence. The fire was reported at 5pm and civil defence crews from three stations spent five hours putting it out and cooling […]
Thanks to a new deep learning system called Caffe2Go, Facebook now lets users of its mobile app transform videos with artwork-inspired special effects in real time. The platform enables such on-the-fly style transfers by dramatically improving how efficiently artificial intelligence (AI) processes images and videos. With the help of Caffe2Go, users of Facebook’s iOS or Android app can quickly change the look of their photos or videos […]
|By Matein Khalid| The fall in oil prices since 2014 has triggered a liquidity crunch and higher funding costs in the UAE banking system. EIBOR is almost double the London interbank rate LIBOR. Non-performing loan (NPL) have begun to rise as property prices have fallen 20% from their peak and corporate/SME borrowers are hit by a sharp downturn in the business cycle. DIB shares reflect these macro […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| GE marked a new milestone in its operational presence in Kuwait with the opening of the GE Kuwait Technology Center (GEKTC), a flagship facility that will foster localized research, provide hands-on training and build an innovation ecosystem specifically for the power sector. Approved by the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority (KDIPA) for a Foreign Investment License last year, the 6,000 sq meter GEKTC, […]
|By Matein Khalid| The Algiers pact was a game changer in the international oil markets. Crude oil prices have risen to three month highs above $50 Brent after OPEC agreed to cut output to the 32.5 – 33 MBD range, with the symbolic Saudi-Iranian deal reinforced by a sharp drop in US inventories and Hurricane Matthew’s havoc in the Caribbean. Unfortunately for OPEC, the US land rig […]
UAE. The UAE industrial market has continued to show a relatively steady performance despite the emergence of economic headwinds, amidst on-going global uncertainty, according to the H1 2016 UAE Industrial & Logistics MarketView, by global real estate consultancy firm CBRE. The softening of crude oil prices over the past 18 months has had mixed effects on the UAE industrial sector, and on the markets in Dubai and […]
|By Matein Khalid| The Federal Reserve did not disappoint the financial markets after Janet Yellen’s FOMC conference on Wednesday. The US central bank did not raise the overnight borrowing (or Fed Funds rate) to 0.5% on the eve of the November election. This triggered a wild rally in the US stock market with the Dow Jones up 163 points, gold up to $1342 and oil to $46 […]
|By Matein Khalid| When Ben Bernanke uttered the word “taper” in May 2013, he triggered a bloodbath in emerging markets and a free fall in “fragile five” currencies that included the Indian rupee and the Indonesian rupiah. However, Asian equities markets, while not immune to a Fed rate hike, are far better positioned for higher US dollar interest rates than in 2013, let alone 2007 or 1998. […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City without light switches or water taps has much to teach people around the world about saving energy and precious resources. With its low-rise and energy efficient buildings, smart metering, excellent public transport and extensive use of renewable energy, the 2,000 citizens of Masdar City are living in a place which is a ‘green’ example to city planners around the […]
SAUDI ARABIA. Saudi Arabia’s non-oil private sector continued on its upward trajectory in August, with business conditions improving to the greatest extent in a year. Output and new business remained the key growth drivers – both rose sharply and more quickly than in July. Employment and input stocks also increased, with a number of companies looking to expand capacity in line with rising workloads. Meanwhile, price pressures […]
/By Matien Khalid/I have been bullish on emerging market debt as an asset class since last autumn. Even though the Chinese yuan devaluation was toxic, this asset class is up 12% in 2016, thanks to almost $5 billion in cash inflows. The tax amnesty in Indonesia, the political changes in Brazil after President Dilma’s impeachment, the election of a center-right pro-business government and $16 billion sovereign debt […]
DUBAI Iran has detected and removed malicious software from two of its petrochemical complexes, a senior military official said on Saturday, after announcing last week it was investigating whether recent petrochemical fires were caused by cyber attacks. The official said the malware at the two plants was inactive and had not played a role in the fires. “In periodical inspection of petrochemical units, a […]
CAIRO — Seven people were killed in Saudi Arabia when a missile fired from Yemen struck a commercial district in the city of Najran, the kingdom’s official news media confirmed on Wednesday. The attack, on Tuesday evening, appeared to have been carried out by Houthi militias in northern Yemen in retaliation for a series of deadly airstrikes by the Saudi-led military coalition on Monday and Tuesday. Those […]
As more and more enterprises give up license-based software in favor of faster, more convenient cloud services, the software industry itself is changing dramatically, according to a recent report from the advisory firm PwC (formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers). Although legacy software companies that have moved into the cloud are reaping the benefits of the growing “as-a-service” ecosystem, they are also facing some risks. The “PwC Global 100 […]
INTERNATIONAL. The future for many young people across the Middle East and North Africa looks bleak. The World Bank records that 54% of the working age population in the Middle East and North Africa is unemployed with little prospect of any positive immediate change. An average of 28.7% of 15 to 24-year-olds in the Middle East and 30.6% of those in North Africa are unemployed according to […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Residential batteries, together with battery applications in commercial, industrial and utilities, are considered to be the next big opportunity in batteries besides electric vehicles. Indeed, this will become a $6 billion market by 2026 as predicted by the new IDTechExResearch report “Batteries for Residential, Commercial, Industrial and Utility Applications 2016-2026: Technologies, Markets, Players and Opportunities”. On April 30, 2015, Tesla officially launched its residential and commercial/utility-scale […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Uzbekistan’s banking system recently received Moody’s endorsement when the agency acknowledged that the country’s banks continue to benefit from a growing economy with well-diversified export revenues. “As a result, banks in Uzbekistan are somewhat shielded from the volatility characteristic of some other countries in CIS,” Olga Ulyanova, a Vice President – Senior Analyst at Moody’s, said in a report. The International Monetary Fund […]
