India buys more Gulf oil than Russian for first time since the war began

India's Gulf oil imports have surpassed Russian crude for the first time since the Iran war began, hitting 2.1 mn bbl / d this month against Russia's 1.8 mn, Bloomberg reports, citing Kpler data. The rebound marks a dramatic reversal from April, when Strait of Hormuz flows collapsed to just 247k bbl / d— down from a 2.8 mn bbl / d February average — after US-Iran hostilities effectively shut the waterway. Tanker shuttle operations are credited with restoring the corridor.

Crude shipments are now close to pre-war levels, with combined exports from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, and Kuwait rising to 15.5 mn bbl / d in October. Russian crude is also currently priced higher than Middle Eastern grades, as Gulf producers offer competitive pricing and facilitate cargo transfers to customers.

Planting the flag

Costa Rica-based IT services picks Doha as its regional hub: SOIN, one of Costa Rica’s biggest IT firms, is planning to invest about QAR 197 mn in Qatar over the next five years to set up its regional HQ in the capital, Doha. The plan, which is still an MoU rather than a final investment decision, would see the Costa Rican firm focus on providing AI adoption and digitization services to enterprises and government agencies in Qatar and beyond.

The plan is yet another example of Invest Qatar’s HQ incentives strategy, which promises to pay back foreign players that set up regional bases in Qatar up to 40% of their capital expenditures over a period of five years. Other companies were lured in under this incentive scheme, such as the Colombia-grown payment orchestration platform Yuno, which launched its regional HQ at Web Summit Qatar back in 2025.

REMEMBER- Qatar isn’t the only GCC market with HQ incentives. Saudi Arabia runs its own regional HQ incentives program that offers 30-year breaks on corporate income tax and exemptions on Saudization quotas, but limits government contracts’ access to those worth SAR 1 mn or less.

Into the sandbox

Egypt’s market regulator experiments are piling up: The Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) granted preliminary approvals to two fintechs to test their services within its regulatory sandbox, taking the roster to 11 since it launched over a year ago, according to an FRA statement. WeLend, working with Tamweely, EFG Finance’s microfinance arm, will pilot an AI model that scores SME creditworthiness using financial and operational data, with human reviewers checking the output. The second approval was awarded to local brokerage Roa’ya Online to pilot a gamified securities trading simulator targeting retail users aged 15 to 35.

AI credit scoring is gaining traction as the FRA has recently introduced a new rule easing the path for more machine decision-making in lending, starting from April 2027. We’ve seen growing use: Tanmeyah is rolling out its own credit-scoring model through I-Score’s Decision-as-a-Service platform, built on Synapse Analytics’ Konan engine and using bureau data to size up micro- and small-business borrowers. Raya Holdings also spun up Raya Nexus, an AI shop with EGP 250 mn in issued capital that sells credit decisioning, collections, and customer management tools to banks and fintechs.

REMEMBER- Egypt’s FRA is running a live tokenization experiment with Granite and Tarmiiz under its sandbox, focusing on tokenizing money market funds, rather than the traditional route of real estate.

Shared custody

Vodafone Egypt will own about 30% of the joint venture building the country’s largest data center and its first sovereign AI data center with Elsewedy Electric and Cassava Technologies, Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub told TechCentral. The roughly USD 1 bn price tag covers the whole project, which will go up in modules as demand materializes: “The number is big, but it won’t be USD 1 bn immediately.” The partners will finance through a mix of equity and debt, and Vodacom will probably handle “the lion’s share of the sales of the data center to customers,” Joosub told Bloomberg.

REMEMBER- The partners unveiled the projects in September, targeting 20 MW of capacity within three years and 192 MW at full build-out. That pledge joins a long list: we wrote in October about how far Egypt’s pipeline of announced data centers runs ahead of the capacity actually funded.