Dabur India Ltd, the household goods maker controlled by the billionaire Burman family, is expanding in the rural market of the world’s second-most populated nation to revive sales that grew at the slowest pace in two years. The company increased its rural network to cover 36,000 villages as of October from 14,000 in March 2012, Dabur said in an e-mail. That helped the maker of Hajmola digestive […]
Investment Corp of Dubai, the flagship holding firm of some of the emirate’s top companies, has acquired the Atlantis hotel from a unit of Dubai World for an undisclosed sum, a statement said on Thursday. The hotel, which sits at the head of a manmade island in the shape of a palm tree, was set up in 2008 as a joint venture between Dubai World’s Istithmar World […]
Dubai’s DAMAC said it raised $348 million from its London share offer on Tuesday, a lukewarm response to the first share sale by a Dubai property firm since the emirate’s real estate crash four years ago. The luxury housing firm, which describes its new villa project as the Beverly Hills of Dubai, had hoped to take advantage of a renewed interest in Dubai’s property market aided by […]
Middle East crude for immediate delivery traded at its biggest premium in two years to later shipments last month after Royal Dutch Shell bought an unprecedented number of cargoes. The price gap between the earliest loadings of the benchmark Dubai grade and those for two months later climbed to $2.82 a barrel on Nov. 21, the widest spread since 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The […]
The Palestinian poet and filmmaker Hind Shoufani moved to Dubai for the same reasons that have attracted millions of other expatriates to the glitzy emirate. In 2009, after decades in the storied and mercurial Arab capital cities of Damascus and Beirut and a sojourn in New York, she wanted to live somewhere stable and cosmopolitan where she also could earn a living. Five years later, she’s won […]
Dubai has proposed to the federal government of the United Arab Emirates that the UAE create a sharia-compliant retirement savings scheme for foreign workers, a step which could help to develop the Islamic funds industry. The aim is that the scheme will be nation-wide, though if the federal government does not want to participate, Dubai may implement the plan merely within the emirate, a source at Dubai’s […]
Dubai’s success in bidding to host the 2020 World Expo will trigger billions of dollars of investment in the emirate, but it may risk a repeat of the boom-and-bust cycle which nearly caused financial collapse just a few years ago. After competing against three cities, Dubai was awarded the world’s fair by the Bureau International des Expositions on Wednesday, setting the seal on a dramatic economic recovery. […]
Asian shares were in a buoyant mood, with Japanese stocks hitting their highest close in nearly six years after the yen fell sharply on relatively positive U.S. economic data, while two major regional currencies slumped. Financial bookmakers expected major European indexes to open flat to modestly higher on Thursday . U.S. jobless claims unexpectedly fell last week and the November Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer confidence improved […]
Emerging Asian currencies took a battering and regional shares tumbled to six-week lows on Wednesday as mixed signals from Federal Reserve officials raised fresh concerns about an imminent rollback of the U.S. central bank’s asset-buying stimulus. The dour mood looked set to carry over into Europe, where financial spread betters predicted Britain’s FTSE 100 to fall as much as 0.7 percent, Germany’s DAX off 0.4 percent and […]
Dubai’s economy expanded 4.9 percent in the first half of 2013, led by the hotel and restaurant industry, as the Middle East’s financial and transport hub rebounds from its debt crisis. Gross domestic product expanded to 169 billion dirhams ($46 billion), the statistics office said in an e-mailed statement today. Growth quickened from a 4 percent pace in the first half of 2012. The hotels and restaurants […]
A surge in passenger car sales across most Gulf Arab countries underlines the momentum behind the region’s consumer spending boom, and sales are likely to continue rising strongly for at least a few years, automobile sector executives said. Car sales are an important indicator of business activity in a region where official macroeconomic data, such as gross domestic product, is often unreliable and released with delays of […]
Mutual funds run by T. Rowe Price Group Inc and Morgan Stanley are poised to send one sweet tweet. These early investors in Twitter Inc will reap exponential gains as the microblogging site goes public, while latecomers struggle for share allocations. T. Rowe’s New Horizons and Growth Stock funds may come out looking smartest, having scooped up millions of preferred shares for a pittance. While mutual […]
Some merchants and dealers were found to have exploited the ‘24 hours’ facility extended by the Dubai government whereby some major shopping malls were allowed to remain open day and night during Eid Al Adha, according to a statement released by Khalid Al Boom, Senior Director of Promotional Events Control Section, at the Dubai Department of Economic Development (DED). The outlets announced false promotional offers and this […]
Dubai luxury housing developer DAMAC Properties said it plans to raise as much as $500 million from an initial public share offer in London, betting on a recovery in a property market that crashed four years ago. If successful, DAMAC would be the first Dubai real estate firm to go public since then. DAMAC, which is building golf courses in the emirate with American real-estate mogul Donald […]
With the D-day approaching fast for the award of the 2020 Expo, everyone in Dubai is excited about a most likely successful Dubai bid. Amidst all the fanfare, however, there is a lurking fear about the impact of a successful bid on the emirate’s real estate sector. Those who do worry have one overriding concern: that Expo fever will tip an already overheating property market into bubble […]
Du, the United Arab Emirates’ second-biggest telecoms operator, remains at odds with rival Etisalat over the terms of a network sharing deal to open up fixed-line services in the country. Du’s CEO Osman Sultan voiced frustration at the impasse more than four years after talks between the companies began. Both are majority-owned by state-linked institutions. Du ended Etisalat’s domestic monopoly in 2007 and both offer fixed-line broadband […]
Passenger traffic through Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, rose 13.1 percent from a year earlier in September to 5.4 million people, airport authorities said on Tuesday. The September clip is well down from August, when passenger numbers jumped 23.8 percent to a record 6.0 million, partly because of travel related to the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. In the first nine months of this […]
Emirates NBD is looking for acquisition targets in Turkey as Dubai’s largest lender scouts for opportunities beyond its home market, despite an improving economic environment within the emirate, its top executive said. ENBD, which completed in June the purchase of BNP Paribas’ Egyptian assets for $500 million, has been looking to diversify beyond Dubai after a real estate market crash in 2008-2010 severely impacted the bank. The […]
Asian oil refiners are facing slumping profits as China is expected to ramp up exports of diesel and gasoline this quarter. The margin from refining diesel in Asia has fallen almost 10 percent in the last 10 trading days, although it would have to drop another 13 percent to plumb the levels reached just after the first quarter, when the Chinese were last major exporters. While Chinese […]
Bahrain is still in the early stages of a series of bank mergers designed to strengthen the sector in the face of regional competition, the central bank governor said. The tiny kingdom’s banking industry, once the most vibrant in the Gulf, was hit hard by the global financial crisis and, since 2011, by political unrest which has deterred some foreign investment. But Rasheed al-Maraj said there were […]
The UAE financial adviser study, conducted by the Durable Portfolio Construction Research Centre of Natixis Global Asset Management (NGAM), one of the 15 largest asset managers in the world based on assets under management, concludes that the UAE is one of the strongest markets for advisers globally, with great potential for further growth if current challenges are successfully overcome. Forty per cent of UAE advisers say their […]
Indians account for the largest number of Dubai property deals, followed by the British and Pakistanis, according to the Dubai Economic Outlook, Quarter 2 report for 2013, issued by the Secretariat General of the Dubai Economic Council (DEC). Many deals recorded as by British might also involve people of Indian origin holding British passports. The report indicates that the real estate sector in Dubai has witnessed a […]
Emirates NBD, Dubai’s biggest bank, raised its estimates for economic growth in the United Arab Emirates this year to 4.4 percent, aided by an increase in oil output. The forecast was raised from 3.8 percent, putting the second-biggest Arab economy on track for a higher growth rate than Saudi Arabia for the first time in at least four years, according to the bank’s quarterly economic report released […]
Dubai’s largest lender Emirates NBD’s saw a sharp increase in its quarterly provisions on Thursday, overshadowing a 21 percent increase in its third-quarter net profit that fell short of analysts’ expectations. The lender, 55.6-percent owned by state fund Investment Corp of Dubai, made a net profit of 775 million dirhams ($211 million) in the three months to Sept. 30, a statement said, compared with 640 million dirhams […]
