Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s most profitable lender, said it will consider acquisitions in the Middle East as part of plans to boost earnings from the region by 50 percent this year. “We’re looking to see if there are acquisition opportunities,” Zhou Xiaodong, chief executive officer for the Middle East, said in an interview from the lender’s Dubai offices. “It’s a good strategy. […]
Former Delhi leader Arvind Kejriwal attacked India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani over gas pricing as he turned his attention full time to a nationwide election due by May after his 49-day rule of the capital came to an end. Kejriwal, who resigned as Delhi chief minister on Feb. 14 after lawmakers rejected an anti-corruption bill, targeted the ruling Congress party, main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Ambani, […]
A well-timed launch saw Dubai Investments Park achieve favourable terms on its debut $300 million, 4.296 percent five-year Reg S sukuk issue, a deal that may serve to accelerate the plans of other regional potential issuers. The real estate firm, rated BB by Standard & Poor’s, kicked off the deal in a strong week for emerging markets and to a market starved of Middle East paper: it […]
A U.S. border checkpoint located a day’s flight from New York in the Arabian desert promises to become an oasis for weary travelers heading for the States. U.S. Customs and Border Protection opened an Abu Dhabi base on Jan. 24, the first in the Middle East and the second outside the Americas after Ireland. Another post is planned in Dubai within a year as part of a […]
A massive cyber attack from unknown sources that has been spamming bitcoin exchanges is highlighting some of the dangers people can encounter when they exchange cash for digital currencies like the bitcoin, experts said on Wednesday. The attack, which is technically known as a distributed denial of service attack, involved thousands of phantom transactions, forcing at least three of the online platforms that store bitcoins and trade […]
Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE), the largest aircraft leasing firm in the Middle East, has ordered 20 turboprop commercial aircraft with an option for another 20 planes from French-Italian manufacturer ATR, the company said on Wednesday. DAE put the value of the purchase at $988 million. “We aim to diversify our portfolio and expand into regional aircraft, to meet an increasing demand from airlines that are developing regional […]
Research from PwC predicts that global assets under management (AuM) will rise to around $101.7 trillion by 2020, from a 2012 total of $63.9 trillion. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 6%. The report, Asset Management 2020: A brave new world, also finds that assets under management in the SAAAME (South America, Asia, Africa, Middle East) economies are set to grow faster than […]
|By K Raveendran| Indians across the world celebrated the elevation of Satya Nadella as the new CEO of Microsoft. Dubai, with its compulsive spirit of celebration, was no exception. The talking point at the week-end parties in Emirates Hills and Arabian Ranches was none other than the Hyderabad techie, who, by virtue of his new role at the most admired company in the world, becomes the latest […]
Dubai house prices are only 15 percent short of their 2008 peak and will return to those pre-crisis highs within 18 months, consultant Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) said on Monday. The emirate outpaced all major property markets last year, with prices climbing more than 22 percent as billions of dollars of government real estate projects triggered a buying binge among investors. The fast growth, however, has raised […]
JP Morgan has cut its correspondent banking relationship with Emirates NBD, Dubai’s largest bank, as part of a global review of its business, sources familiar with the matter said. In a memo to staff last year, the U.S. bank said it would scale back its relationships with foreign banks in order to comply with regulatory pressure to tighten risk controls. As part of this process, the bank […]
Crucial factors such as banking secrecy, diverse investment products and services have contributed to Switzerland remaining a premier offshore haven for the Middle Eastern investors, according to a leading Swiss-based asset manager specializing in the Middle Eastern region. William Spencer, at WT Capital Management S.A, says there is an increase in demand for wealth management solutions from Middle East region, with a surge in requests for custodian […]
The U.N. nuclear agency said on Sunday that Iran had agreed to start addressing suspicions that it may have worked on designing an atomic weapon, a potential breakthrough in a long-stalled investigation into Tehran’s atomic activities. The development – although limited for now – marked a step forward in an international push to settle a decade-old dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran says this is peaceful, while […]
|By TAP Staff| [easy_wiki]Middle East[/easy_wiki] airlines recorded the strongest increase in passenger traffic in 2013,a rise of 12.1% compared to 2012, but below the 15.4% growth recorded in 2012 compared to 2011, according to IATA full-year traffic results for 2013. Carriers in the region have benefitted from the continued strength of regional economies, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and solid growth in business-related premium […]
Final approval for .abudhabi and .dubai web addresses may be only months away, with experts predicting widespread uptake. The global authority that controls the launch of new domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), is in the final stages of approval for the two. It is hoped that by linking the web addresses to the geographical location of a website, it will boost […]
Lazard Asset Management (LAM) said it would expand its Middle East operations by hiring the former regional asset management team of ING Group NV, which resigned from the Dutch firm in Dubai earlier this week. A subsidiary of U.S.-based Lazard, LAM will focus on equities in the Middle East and North Africa and frontier markets with the Dubai-based team of six. Farah Foustok will be managing director […]
Pumping his fist into the Paris air, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi royal, celebrated the award of the 2020 World Expo to Dubai. A Dubai counterpart returned the favor three weeks later, hailing Abu Dhabi’s role in securing the event. The backslapping late last year signaled the ever-closer relationship between the sheikhdoms at the core of the seven-member United Arab Emirates, one a […]
Investment bankers in Europe are off to the leanest start to a year in a decade as dwindling income from deal-making and trading presses firms to reduce costs. Revenue from arranging mergers, loans and stock and bond offerings for clients in Europe, the Middle East and Africa fell 22 percent to $1.58 billion last month from the year-earlier period, according to data compiled by New York-based research […]
ING Group NV, the Dutch financial services conglomerate, said on Monday it was closing its Middle East asset management operation, based in Dubai, after the team there resigned. The closure is in line with ING’s restructuring drive, which involves only maintaining asset management operations in countries where it has a strong insurance presence, Karl Hanuska, a spokesman for ING Investment Management in the Netherlands, said by telephone. […]
Hotels in Dubai reported the highest profit levels in the region in 2013 for the fourth consecutive year, according to the latest HotStats survey by TRI Hospitality Consulting Middle East. During December, Dubai continued to record strong performance levels, reflecting the growth experienced throughout the year, the survey said. These latest figures follow a recent pronouncement by the head of Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing […]
When planners designed the Business Bay district in Dubai at the height of the last real-estate boom, they boasted it would become the largest business and office district in the Middle East. Yet a visit to the site today suggests there is a lot more living than working taking place, with nannies pushing carriages and children romping around a playground. Throughout Dubai, developers are restarting projects that […]
After a scary sell-off in emerging markets in the past week, investors who specialize in the sector are looking for places to hide while also looking for opportunities to benefit. And that means finding countries that have stronger economic underpinnings and political stability, while abandoning or betting against those whose current account balances and government budgets are deeply in the red and where there is political turmoil. […]
The impact of Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on illegal foreign workers is spreading through its economy, moving beyond the labour-intensive construction industry to sectors as far afield as banking and telecommunications. Nearly 1 million foreign workers, out of a total of roughly 9 million, are estimated to have left Saudi Arabia between last March and November, as authorities enforce work permit rules and corporate quotas for employment of […]
DAVOS: Dubai retailer Majid Al Futtaim, which holds the Carrefour franchise in the Middle East, plans to invest about $2.3 billion in Egypt in the next few years, its chief executive said on Wednesday, a sign of Gulf investors’ growing interest in the Egyptian economy. “Total investments on the plan, including Carrefour, should be around 16 billion Egyptian pounds over the next four to five years,” Iyad […]
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday it was possible to turn more than three decades of enmity with the United States into friendship if both sides made an effort. He was speaking in a Swiss television interview after arriving at the World Economic Forum in Davos where he will court the global business community and meet a series of oil company executives on Thursday. Asked whether […]
