Inside a nondescript office building in central London, a roomful of men and women sit at computer screens and talk over Skype with people in faraway places. Sharp-edged Cantonese fills the air, and a flat-screen TV emits a continuous din. It’s the chanting, singing Midlands crowd at Birmingham, England’s Villa Park Stadium: Liverpool at Aston Villa. The match has just kicked off. The name of the company, […]
Dubai home prices, which rose the most in the world over the 12 months through March, slowed in the first quarter after financial authorities took steps to cool the market, broker Knight Frank LLP said. Values gained 3.4 percent in the emirate, slowing from 9.2 percent a year earlier and putting Dubai behind Lithuania, Estonia and Malta for the quarter, London-based Knight Frank said in a statement. […]
Asian shares edged higher on Friday, catching a lift from another record close on Wall Street, while the dollar groaned under the pressure of slumping U.S. yields. The S&P 500 index .SPX posted its third record closing high in four sessions, as investors shrugged off the first quarterly contraction of the U.S. economy in three years and focused on signs of a strengthening labor market. MSCI’s broadest […]
The property game: Help to Buy is also helping Londoners Photo: Justin Sutcliffe The Government is persistently defensive about its Help to Buy scheme, partly because the criticism has been so consistent. Two parts of the scheme have been rolled out by David Cameron in an attempt to improve the route to property ownership, or in his emotive words: “As prime minister I am not going to stand […]
Emaar Properties has secured a $1.5 billion sharia-compliant loan from five local lenders, two banking sources aware of the matter said on Wednesday, the latest Dubai-based borrower to take advantage of buoyant markets to reprice debt. A number of state-linked entities in the emirate have sought to refinance existing debts, even if the loans have years until maturity, as market sentiment towards Dubai improves after its debt […]
FlyNas route map from Jeddah. FlyNas website Saudi Arabia’s FlyNas ended the domestic monopoly of the kingdom’s flag carrier Saudia in 2007, and it’s now aiming to break the stranglehold of the long-haul Gulf airlines too. The low-cost operator intends to launch flights from Riyadh to London Gatwick, continuing its plans to build a long-haul operation from the kingdom. The Saudi-based carrier has this year launched flights […]
|By TAP Staff| The listing of Emaar Properties mall business on Dubai Financial Market instead of Nadaq Dubai as originally envisaged would necessitate an exemption from the DFM rule regarding the minimum size of the float. Emaar is floating only 25 percent of the mall business, while the minimum float required for a listing on DFM is 55 percent. Nasdaq Dubai, on the other hand, allows floatation […]
India’s rupee fell the most in a month on speculation the central bank intervened to curb gains that threaten exports, while importers stepped up dollar purchases to pay month-end bills. The rupee has gained 2.8 percent this month in Asia’s best performance on optimism a new government will step up efforts to revive the economy. Narendra Modi will be sworn in as India’s prime minister today after […]
CAIRO — Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army officer soon to be Egypt’s president, promises to remedy Egypt’s crippling fuel shortage by installing energy-efficient bulbs in every home socket, even if he has to send a government employee to screw in each one. “I’m not leaving a chance for people to act on their own,” Mr. Sisi said in his first and most extensive television interview. “My […]
The surge in oil prices driven by Chinese demand has added $1 trillion to output in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries over 10 years, according to HSBC Holdings Plc. The six-member bloc’s gross domestic product increased to $1.7 trillion between 2003 and 2013, bringing per capital GDP to an average of $35,000, HSBC said in a report on the effect of a “globalizing China” on the Middle […]
Emaar Properties, owner of the world’s biggest mall, hired HSBC Holdings and Emirates NBD as bookrunners for the initial public offering of its retail arm, with Rothschild as financial adviser, five people familiar with the matter said. National Bank of Abu Dhabi and EFG Hermes Holding Co. will also be bookrunners on the sale of between 25 percent to 30 percent of the malls unit on the […]
Analysts are predicting a pre-Ramadan correction on the Dubai Financial Market. They say this has happened twice before: in early 2006 after the near doubling of the market in 2005; and in 1999 when the Emaar-IPO bubble burst. It will happen again. The price-to-earnings ratio has swung from an under-valued 10 to an extremely over-sold 21. Emerging markets in the MSCI Index, whose highly prized inclusion of […]
Mark Carney speaks during the bank’s quarterly inflation report news conference at the Bank of England in London Photo: Lefteris Pitarakis/REUTERS Britain’s economic revival has been helped by rising house prices in some parts of the country, but now the Bank of England is signalling that a bubble may have to be deflated. Yesterday, Mark Carney, the Bank’s Governor, felt moved to warn that the housing market has […]
Dubai’s Emaar Properties said on Thursday that its revenue from villa sales dropped by nearly 17 percent in the first quarter of the year, as it extracted more income from malls and hotels instead. The builder of the world’s tallest tower generated revenue of 256.91 million dirhams ($69.94 million) from sales of villas in the first quarter compared to 308.73 million dirhams in the corresponding period in […]
Damac Real Estate Development Ltd. (DMC) is bolstering Dubai’s drive to lead the global Islamic economy with serviced apartments that are Shariah-compliant from their financing to their restaurants and saunas. Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank PJSC (ADIB) is managing the project’s funding as Damac, which issued its debut sukuk last month, sells the certified Islamic residences, Niall Mc Loughlin, the Dubai-based developer’s senior vice president of communication, said […]
If you are looking for an explanation as to why crude oil prices in Asia aren’t lower, then the blame rests squarely with Chinese stockpiling. China’s record imports of 6.78 million barrels per day (bpd) in April give the impression that oil demand is roaring ahead, but the reality is that almost half a million bpd is being put into storage tanks. The authorities don’t officially disclose […]
|By TAP Staff|The ability of mortgaged buyers of Dubai properties to step on to the housing ladder is set to be curbed in the near to medium term, real estate consultancy Cluttons has predicted.This in turn will impact on the volume of transactions being recorded, the agency said in its report titled Dubai Spring 2014 Residential Market Outlook. “ We are already seeing the first signs of […]
Gold fell to its weakest in a week early on Monday as the euro hovered near a one-month low on fears of policy action from the European Central Bank, but the metal recovered some losses on safe-haven demand over escalating violence in Ukraine. Spot gold eased 0.2 percent to $1,286.40 an ounce by 0313 GMT, after dropping to a one-week low of $1,279.60 earlier in the session. […]
Dubai Financial Market (DFM) will introduce a pre-closing period to its trading sessions from May 14 that will make closing prices more predictable and eliminate large last-minute swings, the bourse said on Sunday. DFM said the move was timed to come ahead of the inclusion of the United Arab Emirates in the list of emerging markets by index compiler MSCI at the end of this month, which […]
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) says it plans to clamp down on beef exports if it takes power after general elections that end on Monday, threatening supplies from one of the world’s biggest shippers of the meat. Surprisingly in a country where so many view cows as sacred, India has been poised to become the No.1 beef exporting nation, supplying markets such as Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and […]
The Dubai business community has been significantly more optimistic during the first quarter of 2014, compared to the same period of the previous year. Optimism is especially high among manufacturing and services firms, according to the quarterly business survey conducted by the Department of Economic Development. The composite Business Confidence Index for Dubai stood at 135.5 points in the first quarter of 2014, an increase of 22.4 […]
With Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. filing to go public, the biggest winner won’t be founder Jack Ma or his fellow executives or even venture capital backers like Silver Lake Management LLC. It’ll be Japan’s Masayoshi Son. Fourteen years ago, Son’s SoftBank Corp. started with a $20 million bet on a then-unknown Web portal connecting Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. That site evolved into China’s biggest Internet shopping […]
Dubai’s bourse has outpaced other Gulf markets by a wide margin in terms of companies’ first-quarter profit growth, data show, supporting its position as the top performer in the region. The emirate’s benchmark soared 108 percent last year and is up 57 percent this year, making it one of the world’s top-performing stock markets over the past 17 months. Although some analysts believe the market is overbought, […]
|By TAP Staff|The Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD), owner of many of Dubai’s corporate jewels, such as the Emirates airline and the airport duty-free business, said its revenues grew 18 percent to $24.8 billion in the second half of 2013. The numbers were revealed in the prospectus released in connection with the plan to raise about $750m in its first Islamic bond issue. The latest full-year revenue […]
