Gulf equity rebounds, IPO delays, record bonds, and Botswana deals

We have a grab-bag of headlines to start your week, including a look ahead to what you might expect when markets reopen. With the workweek just starting in the UAE, much of what we have for you this morning is out of Saudi and Egypt.

UP FIRST- What clears first when the fear premium lifts? The biggest question over Gulf equities isn’t a deal — it’s the day a US–Iran pact lands and the risk premium starts to bleed out of valuations.

We put that to Franklin Templeton’s head of MENA equities, Salah Shamma, who sees large, liquid, PIF-adjacent names moving first — think: banks and big consumer plays foreign money can get in and out of easily. Small- and mid-caps will lag until local confidence catches up.

His more interesting call is the “resilience spending” trade: A pact, he argues, pulls forward years of capital into the things the war exposed as fragile — pipelines and routes that bypass Hormuz, alternative ports and overland links, and a step-up in cybersecurity for critical systems. It’s government-led, defensive, and spread across the GCC rather than a straight bet on the crude price, which is what makes it steadier than the oil trade sitting next to it.

Two footnotes: Shamma expects the UAE to rebound harder in the near term (it fell further, and money rotated into Saudi during the conflict) — and he warns that when the IPO market returns, there’s going to be a lot of fresh paper to absorb at once. You can read the full interview here.

MEANWHILE- The IPO pipeline coming out of Egypt’s privatization program keeps slipping, and you can thank the fallout from the war in the Gulf. The roadshow for the hotly anticipated Banque du Caire IPO will now run in September or October with a year-end float the target, past the original end-June deadline. Nobody wants to IPO in summertime. The regulatory and fair-value work is done and the prospectus sits with Banque Misr and the CBE, with EFG Hermes and CI Capital running the deal.

In context: It’s at least the third time this listing has been knocked off course, after a 2022attempt died on the Ukraine shock and an earlier bid was stopped in its tracks by fallout from the global pandemic.

Saudi’s baby bourse has a big one in the wings. Car-auction platform Qemah is weighing an IPO of 30% on Nomu within two years at a hoped-for c. SAR 2 bn valuation — which would put it among the largest names on a market whose entire cap is around SAR 40 bn. The app cleared 1 mn downloads in its first year and has run more than SAR 3 bn of auctions through it. It joins a Nomu queue that includes MSGAnext week and Mayar’s Ziorak, but the size is the reason to watch this one.

EFG Corp-Solutions has closed the biggest corporate bond in Egypt’s history. The EGP 5.1 bn issuance doubles Corp-Solutions’ EGP 2.65 bn deal from last year and takes the leasing-and-factoring unit’s cumulative debt-market issuance to EGP 16.7 bn, off a record EGP 5 bn quarter in net financed asset sales (up 125% y-o-y). EFG Hermes was sole arranger and bookrunner and Bank NXT was placement agent.

Morocco’s OCP is going to the domestic market for a MAD 5 bn (c. USD 540 mn) subordinated bond. The state phosphate and fertilizer giant is raising the debt to fund its 2027–2030 investment cycle — nearly tripling renewables capacity to 14.3 GW and lifting phosphate rock and fertilizer output by about 40% each, with a new mine at Meskala, an industrial complex at Mzinda, and a green ammonia plant at Tarfaya in the pipeline.

We have two stories for you this morning out of Botswana — not a country that often makes headlines in MENA+.

#1- Botswana wants more of its own diamonds — and it’s looking to the Gulf to pay for it. With Anglo American shortlisting buyers for its 85% of De Beers, Gaborone is in talks with the UAE and Oman to back its bid for a bigger “strategic stake” in the world’s top rough-diamond producer. A foothold upstream may make sense for Abu Dhabi, now a fast-growing fine-jewelry hub as luxury demand cools in the US and China.

#2- Dubai’s Albaddad will fund a USD 1.9 bn urban development in Botswana — among the country’s largest-ever — putting up all the capital while state-owned BDC supplies the land and takes 5%, rising to 26% over time. The 124k sqm New Botswana City runs to a trade-and-exhibition center, offices, retail, housing and five hotels, with the World Trade Center already underway. It’s the same type of playbook Emirati developers have run from Ras El Hekma in Egypt to Eagle Hills in Damascus.

Speaking of real estate: PIF and Egypt’s Talaat Moustafa Group have signed an MoU — non-binding, but worth noting — to explore mixed-use real estate across the fund’s Saudi developments, the PIF said in a statement. The idea is to pair PIF’s capital and land with TMG’s record on integrated communities, with room for co-investors in later phases. It deepens a relationship that already includes Banan, TMG’s first project outside Egypt and a Sela-TMG entertainment JV back home.

Saudi Arabia and Russia are targeting USD 1.46 bn of Russian investment over five years in industrial projects and JVs, with bilateral trade projected to climb to USD 12 bn from USD 3.9 bn, the Saudi-Russian Business Council’s chair said at the St. Petersburg forum, where the sides signed 30 agreements spanning energy, industry, tourism and education.

Who wants what: Russia wants Gulf channels that route around Western sanctions, and the Kingdom wants Russian industrial know-how for the mining-and-manufacturing base it’s building as a second pillar to oil.

ALSO WORTH KNOWING TODAY-

Egypt is close to its third Samurai bond. The USD 500 mn-equivalent issuance is in “the final steps,” Foreign Minister Badr Abdelaty says, with the African Development Bank guaranteeing part of it and proceeds earmarked for green projects. It slots into a bond program just lifted to USD 40 bn, with USD 3-4 bn of issuance targeted next FY.

Paramount’s USD 110 bn, Gulf-backed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery is now under an EU competition probe over its USD 24 bn of PIF, Abu Dhabi (L’Imad) and Qatar Investment Authority financing, with Brussels weighing a forced sale of children’s-TV assets and a 7 July deadline to decide.

Lunate, the Abu Dhabi manager that pioneered the Gulf’s ETF market, will list what it calls the first shariah-compliant GCC dividend ETF on ADX on 23 June — its 20th ETF on the exchange, tracking dividend payers across the UAE, Saudi and Qatar. It follows the firm’s move to list UCITS ETFs on Deutsche Börse Xetra earlier this year.

Market Snapshot

Tadawul -0.6% • ADX 0.3% • DFM 0.9% • EGX30 -0.9%

Brent USD 96.35 / bbl • Gold USD 4,365 / oz • USD / SAR 3.75 • USD / EGP 51.89