MNT-Halan has reportedly lined up bankers for an Egypt IPO. It might be just what the EGX needs to bring back foreign investors.

Egypt’s IPO pipeline may finally be showing signs of life as a high-profile fintech unicorn loved by foreign investors joins a pipeline that already includes two attractive state-owned banking and finance players.

MNT-Halan is weighing an EGX float of its Egyptian business as soon as this year, Bloomberg reports, tapping our friends at EFG Hermes as well as Citigroup. Mounir Nakhla’s firm thinks its domestic arm is worth about USD 1 bn and will look to keep its expansion markets — including the UAE, Turkey, and Pakistan — private. The news comes just after MNT-Halan said it was valued at USD 1.4 bn for the entire operation after a round led by Al Ahly Capital.

Foreign institutional investors have sat on the sidelines as the EGX has surged nearly 24% year-to-date, with the gain being driven by retail buying and appetite from local fund managers. MNT-Halan is one of three offerings that could bring international capital back, and the EGX is already home to Valu, EFG Holding’s most high-profile tech-enabled NBFI play.

If the Gulf war overhang clears, we think foreign investors will have appetite for MNT as well as for Banque du Caire (led by Hussein Abaza, long a favourite of fund managers from his time at CIB) and, possibly, Misr Life.

We’re not as big on the energy companies now being touted by officials in Cairo, who say they aim to have 10 petroleum companies on the EGX this summer under an IMF program, with Petroleum Marine Services and ELAB ready to join Enppi with temporary listings.

Temporary listings aren’t traded stocks — it’s administrative hocus-pocus — and we’re going to want to see serious signs that equity is on the table before we believe that a perennial IPO prospect like Enppi is really going to offer shares on the bourse. The oilfield engineering company has been in the privatization queue for the better part of a decade, having tapped NI Capital in 2017 and a CI Capital-Jefferies-Emirates NBD consortium in 2018 before stalling.

Saudi Arabia’s property-fund machine has another contestant: A Ladun-Al Ayuni consortium is setting up a closed-ended real-estate fund of at least SAR 4 bn to develop Makkah’s Al Khalidiyah informal district, according to a Tadawul filing, with the Royal Commission for Makkah City transferring land into the vehicle for the consortium to service, subdivide, and sell. It comes the same week the pair signed SAR 2.4 bn of RCRC infrastructure contracts.

Ladun-Al Ayuni joins two other Saudi managers who launched hotel-development funds this week, as we reported earlier: Yaqeen Capital is targeting SAR 600 mn for a Madinah project and Osool & Bakheet wants SAR 713 mn for a luxury hotel in Al Khobar. They’re dwarfed by the SAR 4.5 bn vehicle that Arabian Dyar and Al Rajhi Capital launched for Makkah and Madinah earlier this year.

Why it matters: Closed-ended real-estate funds have become the go-to growth engine for the Kingdom’s asset managers in 2026 — and could provide developers with the liquidity that they might otherwise struggle to get from a banking sector that’s being called on more and more to fund other infrastructure projects.

The shakeout in the Gulf oilfield services industry keeps rolling, and the investment theme is pretty simple: buy scale, or get bought.

• Ades is picking up Saipem’s shallow-water drilling business in Saudi Arabia for USD 285 mn, according to a Saudi Tadawul disclosure — picking up roughly USD 1 bn of backlog and five premium jackups, pushing its fleet to 128 units just as Gulf offshore activity restarts, seven months after it bought Shelf Drilling.
• Gasco closed its 50% acquisition of Jaco Gases for SAR 125 mn, per a Tadawul disclosure.
• Israel’s Ratio Petroleum is acquiring UK-listed Pharos Energy in a USD 164 mn all-cash deal, according to an LSE disclosure, inheriting Pharos’s 45% interest two Egyptian concessions.

Magellan Capital is turning a single windfall into a homegrown asset manager. Two years after banking the proceeds of a USD 1.1 bn sale of Zakher Marine to a unit of Adnoc, Magellan Capital has built what it calls the UAE’s largest home-grown hedge fund — a USD 975 mn multi-strategy vehicle running long-only, long-short, and EM credit — and is layering on a USD 250 mn-target asset-backed SME fund plus an advisory arm that recently worked HEA Energy’s USD 550 mn bond. The thesis across all three is the same: the Gulf mid-market is underserved — too small for the bulge bracket, too sophisticated for what private banks repackage.

Dubai Holding is chasing the data-center trade as it weighs a stake in Hscale, the Bain Capital-backed data-center developer, Bloomberg reports. Dubai Holding’s own retail-asset IPO is on ice after the war’s hit to tourism, but it just became Emaar’s largest shareholder at 29.73%.

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French asset manager Varenne Capital Partners has opened a DIFC office, its first move into the UAE, according to a DIFC announcement — one of nearly two dozen such DIFC and ADGM setups or expansions since the war began.

Brussels is the chokepoint for the Gulf’s two biggest media bets: PIF’s USD 55 bn take-private of Electronic Arts faces a 30 July European Commission deadline under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, Reuters reports. And the Gulf-funded USD 110 bn Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros Discovery deal — already cleared by the US DOJ — is offloading a Universal Pictures JV to push its EU antitrust review to 21 July, the news wire reports elsewhere.

Market Snapshot

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