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 […]
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’s benchmark stock index rallied the most in more than two months after the emirate won the right to host the World Expo 2020. The DFM General Index advanced 4 percent to 3,015.65 at 10:02 a.m. in the city, bringing the gain for the year to 86 percent. Emaar Properties , builder of the world’s biggest shopping mall by floor space, jumped 3 percent and Dubai Investments […]
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 […]
Dubai’s government has to make sure its property market is driven by fundamental factors, not speculation, and be ready to act if it sees very rapid increases in asset prices, a senior International Monetary Fund official said on Tuesday. “When you begin to see very rapid increases in any asset prices then you just need to be prepared to act,” said Masood Ahmed, the IMF’s Director for […]
When the British government said last month it would issue its first Islamic bond, the implications went far beyond the debt market: it was a signal that London will not back down in an escalating tussle among cities for Islamic financial business. London has long been the default center for international firms to issue sharia-compliant bonds, part of a fast-growing Islamic finance sector that will be worth […]
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 […]
Emad Mansour, a veteran Gulf Arab banker, is planning to set up an investment bank in Dubai’s tax-free financial zone, he said on Sunday, joining a growing list of regional bankers taking advantage of a revival in deal making and a retreat by big investment banks. Mansour, who has about 20 years of investment banking experience in the region, was most recently the chief executive of Doha-based […]
U.S. lawmakers said they aimed to tighten sanctions on Iran to prevent Washington giving away too much in a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program that diplomats said was still possible despite the failure of high-level weekend talks. Their comments reflected widespread Congressional skepticism about a rapprochement between Iran and world powers and coincided with renewed lobbying from Israel against a proposal it sees as leaving open a […]
Merlin Entertainment, the Madame Tussauds and amusement parks operator, in which Dubai International Capital once held 28 percent stake, is setting up a Legoland park in Dubai along with other potential sites in Japan and South Korea. This is part of the company’s plans to expand globally, which will see the setting up Madame Tussauds in San Francisco and Beijing next year. Dubai had sold its stake […]
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 […]
The 2013 Dubai Airshow is expected to be one of the most popular in the show’s history, with more than 1,000 exhibitors and 60,000 visitors already registered.The five-day show, which kicks off November 17 this year, will be held for the first time at the city’s new $32 million Al-Maktoum International Airport — set to be the world’s largest on its 2027 completion. “The days where air […]
Jignesh Shah resigned from the board of Multi Commodity Exchange of India Ltd., the nation’s biggest commodity trading platform, amid an investigation into the failure of a related spot bourse. Shah, 46, quit as non-executive vice chairman, according to a filing yesterday from the company he founded in 2003. He said he’s leaving to help ensure investors aren’t harmed by “mud-slinging” over the probe. India’s commodities futures […]
Pakistani Taliban fighters secretly buried their leader on Saturday after he was killed by a U.S. drone aircraft and quickly moved to replace him while vowing a wave of revenge suicide bombings. The Pakistani government denounced the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud as a U.S. bid to derail planned peace talks and summoned the U.S. ambassador to protest. Some lawmakers demanded the blocking of U.S. supply lines into […]
Fund managers in the Middle East show little sign of taking money off the table as a year of strong gains for Gulf stock markets nears its end, a Reuters survey showed. Dubai’s market, rebounding from the bursting of a real estate bubble in 2008-2010, is up 80 percent so far this year, while Kuwait is up 33 percent and Saudi Arabia has gained 18 percent. While […]
Dubai Gold & Commodities Exchange is planning to launch a spot gold contract next year, the first of its kind in the Middle East, which it hopes will help take the emirate from being a regional to a more international trading center for the precious metal. Nimesh Shah, a gold dealer at Richcomm Global Services in Dubai, said the spot contracts need to account for relatively small […]
Tehran’s municipality has torn down billboards in the Iranian capital depicting the U.S. government as dishonest and an untrustworthy negotiator, saying the campaign was “unauthorized,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. A cultural institute installed the posters without seeking consent from the municipality’s cultural council, IRNA cited Hadi Ayazi, a municipal spokesman, as saying yesterday. Ayazi didn’t say who was responsible. Billboards in Farsi and English […]
From Saudi Arabia to Israel, traditional U.S. allies in the Middle East are beginning to ask: Is America turning its back on us? President Barack Obama’s diplomatic overtures to old foe Iran and his last-minute refusal to attack Syria have officials in Israel, the Gulf countries and Turkey wondering if Washington is deliberately neglecting them to avoid being dragged into a Middle East facing deeper sectarian strife […]
Mehmood Patel still wakes up early, just as he did when he was a popular heart specialist seeing patients who waited hours for minutes of his time. Instead of surgical scrubs, he climbs into the khaki drabs of the Federal Correctional Complex in Oakdale, Louisiana. He leads health-conscious inmates on a morning walk, then cracks open one of the medical journals on his prison-approved reading list. Counseling […]
Hong Kong restaurant owner Hudson Chang says he can’t lower the bar much further for hiring staff. He warns his employees repeatedly about sending messages on their iPhones during work hours. He pleads with them to be more pleasant to customers. Still, he can’t afford to fire anyone: He can’t be sure of finding a replacement. “We don’t really have much choice,” said Chang, 39, owner of […]
Dubai Holding’s telecom unit could conclude the sale of stakes in two other telecom firms in the next few months, its chief executive said, part of a strategy by state-linked companies to sell assets to repay the emirate’s debt pile. Dubai Holding, owned by the ruler of the emirate, is among a group of state-linked companies trying to recover from a 2009 property crash. The firms face […]
Fosun International Ltd., a Chinese conglomerate that invests in everything from steel to pharmaceuticals to Club Med, has agreed to buy the office tower at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza from JPMorgan Chase & Co. for a whopping $750 million. This isn’t an isolated incident. Zhang Xin, a billionaire property developer who grew rich building Beijing’s central business district, recently bought about 20 percent of the General Motors […]
An international meeting in Paris next month may trigger billions of dollars of fresh investment in Dubai – and, if plans are not handled carefully, contribute to the kind of boom-and-bust cycle which nearly bankrupted the emirate four years ago. Dubai is competing with Izmir in Turkey, Sao Paulo in Brazil and Yekaterinburg in Russia for the right to host the 2020 World Expo. A vote of […]
