Dubai plans to almost double the number of hotel rooms by 2020 as it expects a surge of visitors to the desert sheikhdom ahead of that year’s World Expo. The emirate that spent more than $110 billion to transform itself into the Middle East’s commercial and entertainment hub is seeking to attract 20 million tourists annually by the end of the decade, Helal Saeed Almarri, director general […]
Toyota Motor Corp’s Indian unit has declared a lockout of its workers at two car plants after strained salary negotiations spurred workers to stop production lines. Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) in a statement said it has locked out workers at the plants near Bangalore since Sunday. It did not state for how long the lockout will continue. Over the past 25 days, some workers have stopped production […]
Within 18 months of leaving his trading job to open a lunchtime eatery at the Dubai financial center in 2011, Nabil Al Rantisi was back: selling stocks and rebuilding one of the city’s largest brokerages. “I saw my window of opportunity,” Rantisi, managing director of Mena Corp Financial Services LLC, said in a March 9 telephone interview from Dubai. “Things started picking up in September 2012. By […]
Honda Motor Co is recalling nearly 900,000 Odyssey minivans that could catch fire, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a recall notice posted on Friday. In a March 13 filing with NHTSA, Honda said 2005-2010 Odysseys built in Alabama have a fuel-pump part that could crack and cause a fuel leak, increasing the risk of fire. The company said it has no reports of […]
|By Aki Ito| Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer? When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance. “We […]
Asian shares cautiously rebounded from two-week lows on Thursday but gains were pared after disappointing retail sales and factory output data underscored investors’ concerns over slowdown in China. A standoff in Ukraine and a massive fall in copper prices in recent weeks also spooked investors, although a flat close on Wall Street and some positive data in Australia and Japan helped to cushion the blow. European shares […]
|By K Raveendran| Limitless, a major government related entity in the Dubai Inc, is understood to have approached lenders with a waiver request for the first amortization payment of $0.4 billion due in December 2014 under its 2012 debt restructuring agreement of a $1.2 billion loan. It was a similar waiver request in the past that had precipitated Dubai’s financial crisis beginning 2008. The $0.4 billion amortization […]
|By Illeana Hoffman and Steven Lapidus| Being admittedly a bit too New York-centric, we started off to Dubai with preconceived notions… expecting a sort of Las Vegas-like cityscape, only with restrictive dress and limited food choice. To the extreme, we were even warned by some that we should take care to avoid inappropriate dress. In retrospect, how astoundingly misinformed we were! After 20 hours of traveling, space […]
|By K Raveendran|The recent vote by the European Parliament to allow visa-free travel to Europe for UAE nationals and the reciprocal arrangement under which European citizens can visit the UAE without the need for pre-entry visas will be a tremendous boost to bilateral tourism. The development represents a major achievement for the UAE in terms of its standing in international comity. That this has come despite powerful […]
Qatar will likely face higher labor costs as a result of publicity about deaths of migrant construction workers building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup soccer tournament, the International Monetary Fund said. Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported in September that dozens of Nepali workers had died during the summer in Qatar and that laborers were not given enough food and water. Qatar, which has denied the Guardian’s […]
Dry cargo shippers with smaller vessels are shifting to more-risk, more-reward spot markets, eyeing rising demand for sugar and grains — commodities well suited to versatile supramax and handysize ships. Ship owners generally prefer long-term charters in a weak market. The Baltic Dry Index o-year lows in recent weeks but confidence has been rocked by South Korean dry bulk group Korea Line Corp filing for bankruptcy protection, […]
|By Mayank Bhardwaj and Jo Winterbottom| A bad monsoon in India is the one that fails to deliver enough rain … most of the time. This year, a lack of rainclouds could be the silver lining that the government needs. India has no place left to store more grain, and can ill afford a hefty payout to farmers for the truckloads of produce that another monsoon could […]
A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing over the South China Sea on Saturday, prompting China to send ships to scour the water for possible wreckage. The airline, speaking several hours after the plane had been due to land in the Chinese capital, said it was still too early to say whether the aircraft had crashed. It […]
DAMAC Properties has unveiled a luxury serviced hotel apartments project at the heart of the emirate’s proposed Expo 2020 site. Celestia, as it is known, will comprise of studios, one and two bedroom apartments across an eight-floor complex and will be located in Dubai World Central Residential City, near to the new Al Maktoum International Airport. Facilities will include a retail area featuring fine-dining restaurants and designer […]
Investor sentiment toward Dubai is about the best it has been since before the Persian Gulf emirate skirted default amid the global credit crisis. The cost of insuring its debt against non-payment with credit-default swaps was quoted at 189 basis points at the end of last month, the least since the 187 reached in May, which was the lowest since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., […]
The ranks of the world’s billionaires continue to scale new heights–and stretch to new corners of the world. Forbes’ global wealth team found 1,645 billionaires with an aggregate net worth of $6.4 trillion, up from $5.4 trillion a year ago. A record 268 new ten-figure fortunes, including 42 new women billionaires, were unearthed, another record. In total, there are 172 women on the list, more than ever […]
Stocks slid while oil prices shot up on Monday, after Russia bloodlessly seized a part of Ukraine, escalating tensions between Russia and the West to a level not seen since the end of the Cold War. U.S. stock futures fell 0.7 percent from a record high hit on Friday while Japan’s Nikkei average tumbled 1.3 percent. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fell 0.6 percent. […]
Gold gained more than 1 percent on Monday on escalating geopolitical tensions as Ukraine mobilised for war after Russia bloodlessly seized Crimea, an isolated Black Sea peninsula where Moscow has a naval base. The Group of Seven major industrialised nations condemned Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine and cancelled preparations for the G8 summit, that includes Russia, scheduled for Sochi in June, the White House said. Cash and U.S. […]
|By Ole Sloth Hansen |February was a strong month for commodities, with the broad-based DJ-UBS Commodity index returning more than 5 percent. This was more than the S&P 500 Index, which reached even a new record high thereby moving in the opposite direction of bond yields and the macro data. Some of the major themes and factors behind this performance were: • Adverse weather in Brazil and […]
Dubai is considering listing some of its largest and most valuable state-controlled companies such as the Emirates airline in a move that could raise billions of pounds in revenue. Mohammed al-Shaibani, Dubai’s finance chief, revealed that some of the state-owned companies could also be partially floated on the London Stock Exchange and signalled that the emirate views the UK as a strategic location for future investment. “We […]
Saudi Arabia and India have formed a new joint venture to build a rice distribution hub in Dubai to link Indian production to consumers in Middle East, Arab News reported. Prince Mishaal bin Abdullah bin Turki and global private investor V Raman Kumar have formed the joint venture with India’s rice producer, LEAF India (Lakshmi Energy and Foods), to create West Asia and North Africa region’s largest […]
|AP | WASHINGTON| Our galaxy is looking far more crowded and hospitable. NASA on Wednesday confirmed a bonanza of 715 newly discovered planets outside our solar system. Scientists using the planet-hunting Kepler telescope pushed the number of planets discovered in the galaxy to about 1,700. Twenty years ago, astronomers had not found any planets circling stars other than the ones revolving around our sun. “We almost doubled just […]
Manhattan Attorney Preet Bharara has sent subpoenas to Mt. Gox, other bitcoin exchanges, and businesses that deal in bitcoin to seek information on how they handled recent cyber attacks, a source familiar with the probe said on Wednesday. In the attacks – known as distributed denial of service attacks – hackers overwhelmed bitcoin exchanges by sending thousands of phantom transactions. At least three exchanges were forced to […]
Gold fell 1 percent on Wednesday, retreating from a four-month high, as a dollar rally and surging U.S. new home sales dented bullion’s safe-haven appeal. The precious metal accelerated losses after the Commerce Department said that sales of new U.S. single-family homes jumped nearly 10 percent to a 5-1/2-year high in January. Prior to Wednesday, gold had posted a four-day winning streak with prices up more than […]
