|By Arabian Post Staff| In an unusual move, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund,which is a stake holder in Elon Musk’s Tesla, has invested $1 billion in rival Silicon Valley start-up Lucid Motors. This means the Saudis will benefit, irrespective of which new generation car company achieves leadership in this automobile sector. Lucid is set to start making its first model, the Air sedan, in 2020. The comapny […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| GCC sovereign debt issuance is expected to reach US$53 billion in 2018, surpassing last year’s US$49.5 billion, according to Fisch Asset Management, a Zurich-based asset manager. “GCC sovereign debt issuance has had another strong first half, with the two multi-tranche sovereign bond transactions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar leading issuance of over US$30 billion in the hard currency market,” Fisch Asset Management said […]
According to the latest Reidin Residential Property Price Indices, the index for all residential estates decreased by 1.1 points, from 245.2 to 244.1, which represents a decline of 0.47 per cent in May 2018. Prices also went down by 5.77 per cent year on year. Apartment sales prices registered a decrease in May 2018 with a drop of 0.42 per cent month on month, and 5.53 per […]
|By Matein Khalid| Crude oil prices plunged by 7% in two sessions as Saudi Arabia and Russia confirmed that they would release 1 million barrels a day in the wet barrel markets. Speculative froth in the oil futures markets vanished, to be replaced by a new trading calculus based on the realities of supply and demand – as well as the unknowable (and unquantifiable!) arc of […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Emirates Group reported a 67 percent jump in net profits to $1.1 (Dh4.1 billion) billion in 2017-18 financial year ending March 31, 2018 compared to the previous year, with revenues reaching $27.9 billion (Dh102.4 billion), crossing the Dh100 billion mark for the first time in the history of the 32 year old airline group that includes Emirates Airline and its ground handling and ticketing arm, […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had written an article titled “six reasons to be bullish Saudi equities in 2018, published in the KT on January 28. Yet I was surprised to see Saudi Arabian equities become the world’s second best performing stock market in 2018 after Egypt. The Saudi equity index fund (KSA) I recommended in my column is up 18% at a time when the MSCI emerging markets […]
|By Arabian Pot Staff| The current tailwind in the oil market is likely to propel 100 new offshore projects to be sanctioned in 2018, according to Rystad Energy. This compares to only 60 projects in 2017 and below 40 in 2016, as shown in the latest Oilfield Service Report by Rystad Energy. These projects represent a collective $100 billion worth of capital investment, giving an average of […]
By Matein Khalid A dismal legacy of civil war, sanctions, insurgency, foreign invasion and terrorism has had a catastrophic impact on the Iraqi economy. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told the assembled global elite at Davos 2018 that Iraq needed $100 billion in postwar construction. Yet money alone will not solve Iraq’s problems of systemic corruption, a society divided by sectarian cleavages, poverty, the displacement of 2 million […]
Dubai property prices are falling at increased speed. The Dubai Residential Property Sales Price Index for all residential estates decreased by 2.6 points, from 248.7 to 246.1, which represents a decline of 1.05 per cent in March 2018, according to the latest REID report. Prices also went down by 4.76 per cent year on year. Apartment sales prices registered a decrease in March 2018 with a drop […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|The most popular area for renting an apartment in Dubai was Dubai Silicon Oasis, according to Bayut.com’s latest survey. Rents for 1 and 2 beds here were AED 55k and AED 80k respectively, representing a 0.20% drop for the latter while the former stayed stable. The price of studios in the neighbourhood dropped 5% to AED 38k. Last month’s most searched for area, Dubai […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The Dubai residential market witnessed solid growth in off-plan sales transactions during the last quarter of 2017. According to a recent report by global real estate consultancy firm CBRE, off-plan sales accounted for more than 65 per cent of total sales transactions for the year ending 2017, an increase of approximately 56 per cent in the number of transactions and 44 per cent in […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The increased availability of affordable properties in Dubai is encouraging residents of Sharjah and other northern emirates to move closer to their work places in Dubai, Asteco said in its latest report. This is despite despite waived deposit requirements, rent-free periods, increased number of payments (up to 12 cheques) and rent adjustments at their current residences. The Northern Emirates will remain an affordable […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|A buoyant GCC Bond and Sukuk market achieved an all-time high issuance of USD 70 billion in 2017, with sustained investor appetite expected in 2018, according to a co-authored white paper from Emirates NBD Asset Management (Dubai) and Fisch Asset Management (Zurich). The paper, titled “The GCC Fixed Income Market: Then and Now” identifies key themes in 2017 and provides an outlook for the […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Overall sentiment in the GCC’s construction sector has improved over the last two years by approximately 7 per cent (from 32 per cent to 39 per cent), according to recent findings from Pinsent Masons’ GCC Construction Survey. The findings show that the UAE remains the number one market expected to deliver growth in 2018, with 38 per cent of respondents expecting the country […]
|By Manish Rai| The recent protests in Iran rang a warning bell for the ruling theocracy in Tehran. What started in Iran’s second largest and holy city of Mashhad over rising prices, transfigured into widespread, unprecedented protests against the theocratic regime in towns and cities across the country. The earlier protests mainly emerged from capital Tehran and some major cities. But the latest ones touch a vast panoply […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Rental rates and sales prices are expected to follow a similar path to 2017 with further moderate declines for Abu Dhabi due to the continuous delivery of new supply, according to the Q4 Abu Dhabi Real Estate Report from Asteco. Whilst rental rates for one bedroom apartments decreased by an average of AED 10,000 per annum, the larger two- and three bedroom units dropped […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had projected a bloodbath in the US Treasury bond market since late 2016, when it was obvious that Trump’s tax reform would double the US budget deficit at the same time as the Federal Reserve prepared to “normalize” or shrink its balance sheet by $470 billion. Fiscal stimulus is often a policy ballast amid a depression, as in the early 1980’s or 2009, not […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|Emirates Airline has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to acquire up to 36 additional A380 aircraft. The agreement was signed this morning at the airline’s headquarters in Dubai by Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Chairman and Chief Executive, Emirates Airline and Group, and John Leahy, Chief Operating Officer Customers, Airbus Commercial Aircraft. The commitment is for 20 A380s and an option for […]
|By Matein Khalid| When I first started on a Treasury bond futures trading desk in New York fresh out of Wharton, a senior mentor once advised to keep track of the four heartbeats of gold finance in real time. The price of money (interest rates), the price of currency (the US dollar), the price of oil and the price of gold. The price of money can be […]
|By Matein Khalid| Dubai based Gulf Islamic Investments (GII) acquired a one million square foot Amazon logistics center in Dortmund, Germany for $144 million. This deal is a testament to the boutique global merchant bank created in Dubai by GII’s co-founder/CEO Pankaj Gupta, who I am honored to call a friend. I consciously model my own firm Asas Capial on the strategic path laid out by GII and […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Dubai rental yields have trended lower structurally since 2009, indicating that investors are willing to accept risk with lower risk premia. Of all the major cities analyzed, Dubai remains far above the highest yielding city, suggesting that there is ample room for further yield compression, according to property portal Reidin. In the first nine months of 2017, even though level of transactions are […]
|By Matein Khalid|The rise in Brent crude to $60 a barrel and the trade volume ballast generated by the world’s first post Lehman synchronized economic recovery is hugely positive for UAE economic growth in 2018. After all, the UAE is unique because Abu Dhabi’s 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves is complemented by Dubai’s role as the Gulf’s financial, logistics, aviation, shopping and services hub. The […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Analysts fear that the GCC mobile phone market could see a slump in the wake of the 2018 VAT roll-out, as it happened in many countries, which saw a pre-VAT buildup of inventories, followed by a major slump in sales. Such concerns come at a time when the region’s mobile phone market is already in a state of flux, with IDC’s latest Quarterly Mobile […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Oman surprised analysts and other members of GCC union, which have been preparing to roll out a new tax system from the first of new year, by announcing that it was postponing the implementation of VAT until 2019. According to the earlier schedule, the VAT implementation was to start on January 1, 2018. The Ministry of Finance announced that the application of selective tax […]
