Shielding the cloud

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OPENING NOTE

Another week and month in the books

Good morning, friends. We’re wrapping another week (and month) and the theme still feels a lot like “holding our breath and waiting.” The US yesterday said it was looking into a potential attack on Iran to pressure it as ongoing negotiations stall, with Iran throwing back a threat of “long and painful” strikes on the US if it renewed its attacks. Meanwhile, attacks continued in the South of Lebanon despite the ceasefire, with at least 9 killed and 23 wounded yesterday alone.

Most of us are also waiting to see what the new post-UAE era of Opec will look like. As we argue in this morning’s Opinion column, below, Abu Dhabi’s defection leaves oil markets with three distinct groups with diverging priorities — and no direct organization.

The UAE’s membership in Opec isn’t the only thing Riyadh is shedding — the PIF is formalizing its plans to cut off its funding from LIV Golf after the 2026 season as it reprioritizes its financing and focuses on creating more value at home.

On a more promising note, regional debt markets look like they’re cracking open again and a handful of M&A agreements — including Emirates NBD’s move on India’s RBL Bank — are inching forward.

Feel free to reply to this email if you have questions, comments, or ideas — we read every email — and we’ll see you back here on Monday to kick the week off together. –Salma

Shielding the cloud

Geopolitical volatility and the rising prominence of cloud and data infrastructure in businesses are reshaping the regional architecture of cybersecurity. As more businesses move core operations to the cloud (a trend that began well before the war), the data center has replaced localized (office) servers as the main target.

What worked before may not be working now: A war-driven surge of cyberattacks against businesses and infrastructure in our region and beyond means the traditional way of how cybersecurity worked — often involving managing risks by layering several niche, disconnected tools — might be at a point of diminishing returns, experts tell us. With AI making the tempo and the nature of attacks unpredictable, chief information security officers (CISOs) are increasingly facing what industry experts call “alert fatigue,” which is compounded by the need to manage the disjointed tools they deploy to defend against different types of threats.

You can get your cue from M&A activity in the cybersecurity market: When Google finalized its USD 32 bn acquisition of the AI-native, cloud security provider Wiz in March, it was the latest sign that the model of layering security tools on top of each other could be under duress as new innovators emerge.

“A hyperscaler bought a cloud security specialist, not a traditional security vendor… That’s the clearest signal of where the market is heading,” cloud infrastructure and security specialist Jeff Cooper tells EnterpriseAM. By promising an AI-native, cloud-based platform that centralizes the fragmented security tools stack, the Israeli-born startup is pitching a new model that is able to deal with the new landscape of threats by providing “a unified security platform that improves the speed with which organizations can detect, prevent, and respond to threats.”

The risk landscape

What was already here, just amplified: Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) remains the opening move of any geopolitical flare-up. DDoS volumes rose eightfold in the first half of March, according to StormWall data that EnterpriseAM has seen. “Iranian-aligned actors have reportedly used it as a first layer to create disruption and divert attention while conducting more serious attacks behind the scenes, including data exfiltration, wiping, infrastructure targeting, or coordinating with physical attacks,” Pam Lindemoen, Retail and Hospitality Information Security and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) Chief Security Officer, tells EnterpriseAM.

The targeting of national infrastructure follows the same long-running playbook: 53% of attacks in the war’s first days hit government institutions, dominated by DDoS, defacements, and claimed data breaches. Infrastructure attacks have become a tool of decentralized retaliation and economic pressure.

And we’re seeing the rise of proxy targets, with retail and hospitality becoming an obvious target given the visibility generated by any disruptions in these sectors. “By impacting these high-visibility sectors like retail and hospitality, hacktivists aim to translate geopolitical tensions into tangible economic and public-facing disruptions,” Lindemoen tells us.

What's genuinely new: Three shifts stand out. The first is tempo and targeting specificity in the Gulf region, particularly from Iran-linked organizations over the past several years, Cooper tells us. The second is the rise of AI-driven novelties, with attacks that don’t match most existing detection signatures. “There’s no playbook. There’s no pattern to match,” Cooper says, marking a sharp break from traditional security operations centers, which are largely built around pattern recognition. The third is the appearance of credible physical threats against civilian cloud infrastructure (aka data centers), a development Cooper frames as “unprecedented” given how current protections in place are inadequate. “That gap between the physical threat and the physical defense posture is where I think the real exposure lives right now,” he adds.

The new normal: The threat baseline established during this surge is not going to recede, experts tell us. “The cyber war did not begin with the military conflict, and it will not end with any military ceasefire,” Lindemoen says, noting that many Iran-aligned threat groups operate outside direct state control and are therefore not always bound by ceasefire agreements. “This is the new normal for the foreseeable future,” Lindemoen adds. EFG Hermes Group CISO Osama Hijji is blunter: “The truth is, we are under attack around the clock, 24/7, every minute and every second.”

The pre-war signal was also clear well in advance — cyber attacks surged days before bombs started dropping, affecting government and financial services, according to CloudSek. “The cyber war started about 11 days before the physical war did, for instance — and because we have offices in the Gulf, we started seeing attacks hitting our perimeter there,” Hijji tells us.

If the truce materializes (and holds)? “We have no truce; cyber warfare continues and never stops,”Hijj adds.

AI is now both the weapon and the shield

The reason layered defenses are buckling against this new threat profile is, in large part, AI. The technology is simultaneously accelerating attacks and becoming indispensable to defense, and the asymmetry between the two is what's reshaping the architecture beneath every security system.

On the offensive side, AI is enabling attacks that don’t fit any established pattern. Hijji described one incident at EFG Hermes in which attackers attempted to feed a customer-facing AI chatbot manipulated information and links, prompting the model to “lure customers into something the attacker designed” — a class of attack that didn't exist a generation of security tooling ago. The Iran-linked Handala campaign against Stryker in March is the other end of the spectrum: A credential-driven attack — a simple but efficient type of attack as old as cybersecurity as a field.

On the defensive side, AI is being baked into the security layer rather than bolted on top. Cooper describes the architectural shift toward AI-native security as moving toward integrated and centralized capabilities that could keep organizations resilient over the next three to five years.

But confidence in AI-leveraged defense is building up at a slower rate than AI-powered attacks — and for good reason. “As confidence builds and track records get established, the industry will gradually extend the boundaries of what AI is allowed to do autonomously. But we’re not there yet, and pretending we are is how you end up with an AI-driven outage that wasn’t necessary,” Cooper explains.

How does the use of AI look on the defense side? It’s all about automation — and AI needs to get better with fewer false positives and false negatives so that automation can scale. “If AI detects activity on a specific low-risk server or component, letting it act without a human is defensible. But major changes to production, configuration changes that affect multiple systems, or shutting down a critical component absolutely require a human,” Cooper says. For now, a reasonable bridge to maximize AI potential would be to allow it to “identify a potential event, then hand off to a human with a scripted, predictable response,” he adds.

But the balance of power is tilted towards attackers, an asymmetry that keeps every CISO up at night. “It’s easier to find a novel offensive use of AI than it is to build a reliable defense against one,” Cooper says. “You’re often waiting on a vendor, or building it yourself, and either way, your legacy systems may not plug into AI tooling without a meaningful technology refresh first,” he adds. That means the pace of AI-enabled attacks far outpaces cyber defenders’ ability to build new protections. “That gap is the real problem,” Cooper tells us.

And that asymmetry is precisely why the market is consolidating on cloud-native, AI-first security platforms — the only architecture with the promise of data scale and update velocity to keep the gap from widening.

Humans, meanwhile, are not out of the loop, but their role is being redefined. “Human in the loop isn’t a single rule applied uniformly. It’s a sliding scale tied to the consequence of the action,” Cooper says. AI can autonomously handle low-risk anomalies on a single server, but major changes that touch multiple systems still need human judgment. AI also gets it wrong in both directions with false positives and false negatives.

And what is our region doing about it? We know Saudi Arabia and the UAE are going all in on AI-leveraged security. In Saudi Arabia, 15% of all AI research output focuses on security, privacy, and cryptography — the highest within-country ratio globally, according to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s 2026 AI Index Report. The UAE comes third globally after India, with 12% of its AI research output focused on these segments.

A new-ish defense playbook… and a bigger bill

What’s next? As the trends of AI-driven attacks and the centrality of the cloud in business operations becomes more cemented, CISOs need to get their house in order to address the mix of old and new threats. This will require CISOs to build their defenses on three non-negotiable strategic pillars that move beyond the layering philosophy of the last decade.

#1- Treating credentials as the most likely point of failure. “Credential security remains the most common and most underestimated exposure in enterprise security today,” Cooper says. He recommends consolidating on a dedicated identity provider, on the logic that identity vendors prioritize hardening as their core business in a way general-purpose infrastructure does not. The Stryker breach is the cautionary tale: stolen credentials, exploited at scale.

#2- Consolidating rather than sprawling — and this is where players like Wiz come in. Maintaining discipline across many disparate tools is harder than across a unified platform. “Thoughtful consolidation on trusted specialist vendors almost always beats vendor sprawl,” Cooper says. Maintaining discipline across many disparate tools is harder than across a unified platform, he adds.

The third is building for compartmentalization. Cooper's analogy is the Titanic: “The Titanic lacked adequate isolation. One catastrophic breach, and water moved freely through the entire hull.” The fix in shipbuilding was compartmentalization, and the same logic now governs cloud-native security architecture — contain the breach so it doesn't spread.

We are yet to see how building cyber defenses on similar pillars could impact budgets, largely because AI is yet to deliver on its potential to cut costs in so many other sectors. Firms like Uber are already reporting ballooning AI costs, and there is the risk that the compute cost required for AI-driven defense could end up exceeding the human salary lines they were meant to displace.

But so far, CISOs are expecting their budgets to change more in shape than in size. Security spending rose from 0.57% to 0.75% of revenue in 2025, while IT spending climbed from 3.2% to 3.9%, according to the RH-ISAC’s 2026 CISO Benchmark Report. 54% of surveyed CISOs expect incremental budget increases this year — a measured rise rather than a step change, and about 90% expect spending on AI-related security to grow, but mostly through reallocation rather than new funds.

Bye-bye Opec, hello three-body problem

Does the UAE’s departure from Opec leave Saudi Arabia as the organization’s undisputed anchor? We won’t dive deep into the political rift for now and, while that framing is correct as far as it goes, what would Saudi Arabia be anchoring really? An even more difficult question to answer is whether Opec could still credibly set a price level for oil that the rest of the market organizes around and what does this mean for our region. We think these days are behind us now.

You see, in wonky terms, the dynamic between Saudi Arabia and other Opec members was less that of a cartel, in a traditional sense, and more of what economists speaking with marbles in their mouth would call a dominant firm model with a competitive fringe. Saudi Arabia, sitting on one of the lowest marginal cost barrels and the largest spare capacity, set the price by adjusting output. Non-Opec producers (the US, the North Sea, later Russia) took the price as given and supplied what they could. The cartel structure held because Riyadh had the capacity to credibly threaten to flood the market with production and make all producers suffer from lower prices as a result. It also worked because the “fringe” was passive enough not to swamp the residual demand curve.

Does this sound confusing and needlessly complicated? Don’t worry. That model just had the last nail driven into its coffin.

The dominant firm structure that gave Opec its pricing power from 1973 to about 2014 is now gone. What replaces it is genuinely unsettled, and the answer matters for every oil-importing economy in the region.

The cracks in that Saudi-led Opec system have been compounding for a decade. US shale broke the fringe assumption in 2014, making non-Opec supply materially more elastic than the dominant firm model required. Saudi’s 2014 abandonment of the swing producer role was a recognition that defending high prices was funding the fringe’s expansion. The 2016 Opec+ pivot — when Opec and 11 non-Opec members signed the Vienna Declaration of Cooperation to formalize Opec+ — effectively turned oil-price management from a Saudi-led project into a Saudi-Russia coordination problem.

From there, the structure kept shedding pieces. Qatar walked in January 2019, then Ecuador followed in January 2020 and Angola in Jan 2024, each citing a version of the same baseline-versus-capacity grievance. Chronic “cheating” by Iraq, Russia, and Kazakhstan ran in the background throughout.

Coordination failed publicly in March 2020 during the Saudi-Russia price war and again in the July 2021 UAE-Saudi baseline dispute that was papered over rather than resolved. What happened then was that the UAE blocked an Opec+ production deal because its quota baseline (3.17 mn bbl / d, set off 2018 production) no longer reflected the capacity it had built (4+ mn bbl / d). After two weeks of public stand-off and a Brent spike, Saudi Arabia conceded a partial baseline raise to 3.65 mn bpd, which bought time without resolving anything.

Quota tensions between Saudi and the UAE kept growing, and for good reason. As Bloomberg’s Ziad Daoud notes, while last year’s average oil price of USD 67 / bbl meant the UAE managed to record a budget surplus of nearly 5% of GDP, Saudi Arabia faced a 5% deficit.

The UAE kept building capacity, the mismatch kept widening, and this time, the UAE’s exit is probably that same dispute reaching its terminal point. In essence, the UAE exit now is not a rupture, but rather the loudest piece of a slow and inevitable structural collapse.

So, what are we left with now?

Essentially three large strategic producers (Saudi Arabia, Russia, UAE) with a total sustainable production capacity between them of around 27-28 mn bbl / d. They each have different fiscal breakevens, different capacity trajectories, different geopolitical ambitions, and different posturing toward Washington — Russia is ambivalent at best, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE competing directly for attention, influence, and investment. We also still have a US shale fringe that is structurally elastic in a way the original model never assumed. Plus Iraqi, Iranian, and Libyan production that remain in theory viable, but currently volatile for political reasons rather than commercial ones.

In a nutshell: Three distinct groups, no direct organization, and a complete mess.

This is, formally, closer to a three-player coordination problem with imperfect monitoring and divergent payoffs. The economics literature on three-player tacit collusion is as unkind as it is complicated, and stable coordination there is harder by a non-trivial margin. As Hamzeh Al Gaaod put it in his note that we shared on Wednesday, the exit signals “a decisive shift toward an independent, state-driven oil strategy.” Cheating, in cartel terms, is now done by more players — and who are no longer in the room.

Ok, now, why does any of this matter?

Well, the price floor for the oil markets is now probably weakened severely and permanently. For the next 12-18 months, the reality will be masked by the Strait of Hormuz blockade and lingering production disruptions, keeping prices higher regardless of structure. After is where the picture materially changes. If Saudi Arabia tries to defend prices through deeper unilateral cuts, those cuts could fail faster than they used to.

If Riyadh accepts a lower realized price and goes for higher market share, the price band stabilizes even lower. This wouldn't bode well for its Vision 2030 expansionary fiscal policy — and it’s not like they will be able to gather all major producers to set production quotas like before.

The pain from this new order might not just be confined to the Gulf and other oil producers globally. The production levels that funded the GCC’s spending also had a direct impact on the rest of the region’s external accounts. A sustained oil price collapse potentially poses risks to Egyptian, Jordanian, Pakistani, and Indian fiscal positions through three channels at once: GCC remittances; FDI and project finance from Gulf sovereigns (the largest single source of new capital into Egypt over the last three years and rising fast in Pakistan); and goods trade and transit revenues. including Suez Canal receipts.

The broader MENA-India corridor is also not immune as it relies on Gulf-funded demand at one end and Indian growth at the other. Even if India’s direct GCC exposure has narrowed as remittances rebalance toward advanced economies, the corridor and trade channel still reaches Delhi.

For the medium term, a significant external risk for the region’s oil importers is no longer a sustained oil price spike. It could, oddly enough, be a sustained oil price collapse that would soften the Gulf’s capacity to underwrite everyone downstream of it and with a complicated political rift to manage.

Bahrain is the regional canary in the coalmine, though now with a complicating wrinkle, it might be where we first see the impact of this rift. It is the most exposed GCC state to a sustained oil price collapse by an order of magnitude, with a projected fiscal breakeven at around USD 167 / bbl in 2030, a double-digit fiscal deficit, and a triple-digit debt-to-GDP.

The patronage channel that has historically backstopped Manama, most visibly the USD 10 bn coordinated GCC rescue in 2018, depended on a regional alignment mechanism that no longer exists in the same form. This channel has not disappeared so much as it has been reorganized. Three weeks before its OPEC exit, on 8 April, the UAE central bank signed a USD 5.44 bn five-year currency swap with the Central Bank of Bahrain, on the back of an investment-protection agreement that entered into force in May 2025 and a bilateral tax treaty from 2024.

Read together, these are the architecture of a soft bilateral backstop: Manama gets a peg-defense mechanism that does not run through Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi gets an explicit financial stake in Bahraini stability that competes, rather than coordinates, with Saudi influence. Sure, the canary survives for now, but the cage has changed. Bahrain becomes a place where Saudi-UAE rivalry now plays out on Manama’s balance sheet directly — and that works as long as the UAE’s commitment holds. It works less well if regional tensions escalate and Bahrain finds itself having to pick a side it didn’t previously have to.

None of these economic shocks are necessarily a done deal. Yet, from a political and policy point of view, we are in uncharted territory. The next Opec+ meeting could tell us what path Riyadh has chosen. We’ll be watching clues from the language on quota discipline and the tone toward Russia while keeping an eye on potential surprises of news of countries potentially readmitted or added to the organization.

The UAE’s stance will also become clearer over the next few weeks and we’ll see if it withdraws from more regional alliances and organizations. In the corporate world, we’ll also keep a close eye on something like Adnoc’s production trajectory: Capacity additions matter more than headline output now. And we’ll continue to watch Saudi fiscal break-even commentary, which has been creeping toward USD 100 / bbl as spending accelerates. The marginal cost of defending that level has probably just risen.

At the end of it all, the dominant-firm era was, ironically, what made the market and oil price floor reliable. We probably just lost that and, with it, we probably lost the aspirations of a stable, policy-coordinated Gulf.

Cooling off

Saudi Arabia’s GDP growth cooled in 1Q 2026 to 2.8%, marking its slowest growth in three quarters and falling from the 3.7% growth recorded in 1Q 2025. On a quarterly basis, growth shrank 1.5% compared to 4Q 2025 on the back of oil activities dropping 7.2% q-o-q.

Blame the blockade: The slower growth came as the US and Israel’s war on Iran and disrupted shipments of oil through the Strait of Hormuz led Saudi Arabia’s oil activities to contribute just 0.7 percentage points of GDP growth during the quarter. Non-oil activities “were the main contributor to GDP growth,” accounting for 1.7 percentage points of the total and growing 2.8% y-o-y.

REMEMBER- The IMF is expecting Saudi Arabia’s growth to average 3.1% in 2026, the fund said in its World Economic Outlook report last month. That figure is 1.4 percentage points lower than the Fund’s initial outlook in January. However, growth is expected to pick up pace again to 4.5% in 2027.

Against that softer macro backdrop, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) is tightening its belt — and getting brownie points from Moody’s for it. The PIF’s newly-approved 2026-2030 investment strategy — which focuses more on creating value rather than pure growth — will strengthen the fund's financial resilience and support long-term economic diversification, Moody’s said in a note.

Exhibit A: PIF is officially cutting the cord from LIV Golf, with the fund set to halt its financial support for the breakaway golf league at the close of the 2026 season, the Wall Street Journal reports. The decision, which came after PIF sank USD 5 bn into LIV since its launch in 2022, is due to the fund’s investment strategy no longer lining up with the substantial investment the golf league needs over a longer term. Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, a LIV founder, has stepped down as the league's board chair, and LIV is now pitching outside investors to fund operations from 2027 onward.

Sluggish

GCC project awards fell 9.7% y-o-y to USD 61.2 bn in 1Q 2026, dragged down by sharp slowdowns in the region’s two largest markets — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — as the US-Iran war rattled investor sentiment and gigaproject momentum continued to slow, according to Meed Projects data cited by Kamco Invest (pdf).

The headline numbers: Saudi awards halved to USD 11 bn — their second-lowest quarterly level in more than five years — while UAE awards dropped 18.5% y-o-y to USD 29.2 bn. The regional decline was partially offset by stronger quarters in Kuwait — where awards were up more than fivefold to USD 8.1 bn — as well as Qatar (+62.1% to USD 8.8 bn) and Oman.

IN CONTEXT- The regional war has dampened foreign investor sentiment and caused disruptions at several major energy and industrial facilities across the Gulf. Foreign investors pulled some USD 120 bn from the UAE earlier in the conflict, and some major firms have paused plans to invest further in projects, including London-based data center firm Pure Data Centers. CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC recently that the firm is pausing data center investment decisions in the region due to the war until “everything settles down,” adding, “no one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak.”

The Gulf is now also facing a whopping USD 58 bn repair bill for existing energy infrastructure, as well as rising raw material costs, which means a recalibration of project funding is not out of the question.

This comes as some USD 86.7 bn worth of projects remain in the bid evaluation stage, and USD 52 bn are in tendering. That’s out of an estimated USD 550 bn worth of projects in the pipeline, mostly in construction and transport.

Construction + power took the biggest hits

Construction led the downturn, falling 64.4% y-o-y to USD 3.4 bn in Saudi Arabia and 39.9% to USD 7 bn in the UAE. Power awards collapsed 95.8% y-o-y in the UAE to USD 333 mn, and came in at just USD 148 mn in Saudi Arabia. Saudi water awards dropped around 85% y-o-y to USD 729 mn, while gas awards there were just USD 16 mn.

The bright spots: The UAE’s transport sector accounted for more than a third of awards at USD 10.1 bn (more than tripling y-o-y) and gas awards more than doubled to USD 8.5 bn. In Saudi Arabia, chemicals posted the largest absolute increase, rising to USD 2.5 bn during the quarter.

A sluggish year, but sizeable pipeline ahead

“GCC project activity is anticipated to witness sluggish momentum in 2026, weighed down by the destabilizing repercussions of the US-Iran conflict for the region as well as for the global economy,” according to Kamco Invest. Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain have declared force majeure on parts of their energy assets, tightening fiscal space and constraining project funding.

Still, the pipeline remains substantial: USD 2 tn-worth of upcoming GCC projects, with Saudi Arabia accounting for nearly 50% (USD 999.3 bn) and the UAE 27.5%. Construction makes up 39.7% of the pipeline, followed by transport (16.3%) and power (15.7%). Saudi Arabia remains MENA’s largest project market under execution at USD 735.1 bn.

A rebound is tentatively expected from 2027, according to Kamco Invest, in line with the projected rebound in economic activity. There are already some positive signs for 2Q 2026, at least: The UAE kicked off the quarter with AED 3.5 bn in contracts for Palm Jebel Ali and a new AED 34 bn Metro Gold Line set to break ground.

Continental

Nearly all African countries have zero-tariff access to China as of today, which Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters will encourage China-Africa trade and investment cooperation. The zero-tariff treatment is also designed to “help Chinese companies explore the African market, bring more opportunities of investment and industrial upgrade to African countries, and build up Africa’s own capacity for development,” Lin said.

In context: Since late 2024, China has included any nation across the world classified by the UN as a least developed country under its zero-tariff regime, in addition to a set of extensive reciprocal trade agreements across Asia, Australasia, and Latin America that ensure zero-tariff access for most goods.

Also from the China corridor…

Jeddah Islamic Port is now directly connected to China’s Shanghai and Nansha, following the addition of the China United Lines (CULines) SGX shipping service. The new route also connected Jeddah to Egypt and other ports in Malaysia, with a capacity of 2.4k TEUs.

Links, links, links: Jeddah has become one of Saudi Arabia’s main tools for adding route density and widening liner access while Red Sea shipping patterns remain under pressure. The port has seen a steady run of new service additions over the past year, including routes tied to India, China, Egypt, Jordan, Singapore, Djibouti, Berbera, and Oman.

No fracking way

Chevron’s next move in Libya: Libya’s state oil company, the National Oil Company (NOC), is partnering with US oil giant Chevron for a joint study on the country’s unconventional oil and gas resources. The pair signed an MoU for that effect, agreeing to explore sedimentary reserves in the Sirte, Murzuq, and Ghadames basins.

Uh, what exactly are unconventional resources? These are usually oil and gas resources trapped in hard-to-exploit natural conditions and are more expensive to extract as a result. That could be shale oil and gas trapped in low-permeability and porosity reservoir rocks — as in the case of Libya — which requires techniques like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) to create enough pressure to release the fossils. Other unconventional forms could be found in conventional reservoirs, but still need unconventional extraction techniques due to their high viscosity, such as sand oil — you can find lots of that in Venezuela and Canada.

But why go unconventional if there’s a slew of traditional exploration opportunities? The answer lies in the timeline and the current global energy landscape. While it's more capital-intensive, the time from exploration and drilling to bringing production online is usually much shorter for shale oil and gas. We’re talking days or weeks vs. months or years for conventional reservoirs. That means that shale production developers have better revenue recovery timelines — and with global oil and gas prices expected to be elevated at least until the end of the year, there’s good reason that an international oil company like Chevron wants to act quickly on shale opportunities.

And while the market case for fracking is solid with record-high oil prices, it’s too early to take this development seriously. For starters, Chevron is yet to put boots on the ground in Libya and is currently adopting a wait-and-see approach despite already securing drilling concessions in the Sirte basin back in February, as we previously reported. And after all, we are talking about an MoU looking at assessing the potential rather than an actual shale exploration/drilling operation.

The possible environmental costs are something that Libya must reckon with, though. Fracking is known for its risk of contaminating groundwater due to its use of high-pressure techniques to force the shale oil and gas out. For a country that depends on underground water for 97% of its water supply, any large-scale fracking without strong oversight to ensure site integrity could be risky for Libya’s water security.

IN CONTEXT- The US has been pushing for economic and political reform in Libya, largely motivated by business opportunities in the country, we’ve been told. The latest US success in Libya came in early April when Libya’s two governments signed on to a unified budget — Libya’s first in 13 years — raising hopes for investors that doing business in the country may get less complicated. Many businesses struggle with profits repatriation in the country, and over a decade of parallel spending by Libya’s two governments ultimately triggered a currency crisis back in 2025.

Also from Libya

Another oil discovery, another viability test: A consortium composed of Algeria’s Sonatrach, Oil India, and the Indian Oil Corporation struck oil in block 95/96 of the Ghadames Basin, the Indian Petroleum Ministry said. The new well — the fifth discovery in the concession block since the consortium resumed exploration last October — achieved daily production of 13 mn cubic feet during pumping tests, which means the well is now moving to economic viability assessment.

Background: The consortium first secured drilling rights for eight wells in the concession block in 2008. At least six have been drilled as of early April.

Reopened

Emirates NBD just reopened the regional AT1 market, after successfully pricing its USD 750 mn issuance at 50 bps tighter than its initial guidance, according to a press release. The move marked the first re-entry by a GCC player into debt markets since the war began and saw pricing tighten to 6.25% from initial price point guidance of 6.75%. The six-year, non-call notes will be listed on Euronext Dublin and Nasdaq Dubai. The issuance saw orders of more than three times the issuance size, with demand coming from the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the UK.

ADVISORS- Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Emirates NBD Capital, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Citi, Barclays, HSBC, and JP Morgan were joint lead managers and bookrunners. Linklaters was dealer counsel, and Clifford Chance acted as issuer counsel.

Kuwait’s crude pipeline sale takes a step forward: JPMorgan, HSBC, National Bank of Kuwait, and Kuwait Finance House are stepping into a USD 6 bn financing syndicate for buyers eyeing a stake in Kuwait Petroleum Corporation's (KPC) pipeline network. The debt package is structured as a 20-year loan priced at around 170 bps over the secured overnight financing rate, people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Emirates NBD also just cleared the biggest hurdle on its USD 3 bn move on Mumbai’s RBL Bank — India’s Sebi signed off on the “change of control” in a letter dated 29 April. The 60% stake (with a path to 74%) would reclassify RBL as a wholly-owned foreign subsidiary.

Qatar Investment Authority-backed Airtel Africa is steering its mobile money arm Airtel Money to a USD 1.5-2 bn London IPO that could value the unit at c. USD 10 bn — walking away from a UAE listing the regulator had already cleared, Bloomberg reports.

Catalyst Partners Middle East (CPME) is vying for up to 100% of EIH Consulting, a precious metals investment and consulting firm, and its subsidiaries, it said in a bourse filing (pdf). The EGX-listed SPAC — the country's first of its kind — secured initial BoD approval to acquire a controlling stake (50% +1) in EIH and its subsidiaries.

The transaction sits somewhere between the EGX and the physical metals market: Bringing in mobile gold and silver app Mngm — a precious metals platform developed by EIH Consulting — pulls CPME beyond SME lending and into retail savings and commodities, which makes sense in a market where gold is the default hedge.

Our friends at Mashreq posted 1Q 2026 net profit of AED 1.9 bn, up 7.5% y-o-y on a 20% jump in non-interest income — fees and FX now account for 41% of total income, the bank said in its earnings release (pdf). Customer loans climbed 33% and the cost-to-income ratio sat at 31%.

Higher prices help offset softer sales for Fertiglobe, with the Adnoc-owned urea and ammonia producer and exporter delivering a strong bottom line in 1Q 2026. Adjusted net income nearly doubled to USD 145 mn on higher pricing, even as volumes came under pressure from trade disruptions, dipping 12% y-o-y, according to its management discussion and analysis report (pdf) and earnings release (pdf). Revenue rose 32% y-o-y to USD 915 mn.

ALSO WORTH KNOWING TODAY-

Morocco’s ONHYM has kicked off the first fundraising round for the USD 25 bn, 5.6k km Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline, marking the agency's debut as a public limited company, Bloomberg reports. The pipeline aims to link West African reserves into European markets.

Logistics firm Aramex refinanced AED 815 mn of debt, rolling its USD and GBP loans into one UAE-domiciled facility backed by local and international banks.

e& finalized its EUR 95 mn buy of broadband operator UPC Slovakia, slotting it under its O2 Slovakia subsidiary, the telco said in a regulatory filing (pdf). The deal follows the takeover of Telenor Pakistan and the launch of a wholesale hub in Miami.

BNP Paribas is selling its 67% stake in Moroccan subsidiary BMCI to Holmarcom Group, with closing expected in 4Q 2026. The French lender is keeping its institutional and corporate desk in Casablanca.

Market Snapshot

Tadawul -0.45% • ADX -1.24% • DFM -1.63% • EGX30 -1.19%

Brent USD 110.4 / bbl • Gold USD 4,633.1 / oz • USD / SAR 3.75 • USD / EGP 53.10

Rolling, rolling…

UAE-produced vehicles get a Europe-bound access courtesy of Latakia

Latakia Port opens a UAE-Europe vehicle corridor: Syria’s Latakia Port handled its first vehicle transit shipment under a new UAE-to-Europe model — loading more than 200 cars that arrived via the Nasib border crossing for onward exports to markets, including Spain and Belgium. The operation marks the first use of this Ro-Ro transit model at the port, linking Gulf overland flows with Mediterranean shipping routes through Syria.

More volume is already in the pipeline: Over six vessels are scheduled to call at Latakia, with more than 4k vehicles set to move to and from Gulf markets, alongside other cargo from Europe and North Africa. The activity builds on earlier momentum this month — when the first transit container rerouted through Syrian territory from Jordan’s Aqaba Port to Latakia.

Egyptian-Emirati alliance to launch USD 500 mn mixed-use portfolio

Emirates Global has partnered with Egyptian developer Delta Capital for UrbanDevelopment to launch a USD 500 mn portfolio of mixed-use projects across Egypt, Zawya reports. The 500-acre portfolio will span residential, commercial, and service projects in Cairo, Kafr El Sheikh, and El Mahalla El Kubra, and first construction moves will begin in 2027.

Another Chinese tiremaker circles Egypt for production base

Chinese tiremaker Shandong Linglong is looking to set up a USD 2 bn tire manufacturingcomplex in Egypt’s Borg El Arab. While no timeline was given for the complex, company representatives said that they’re looking to secure the required licenses and approvals to move forward with the project. The tiremaker plans to export 90% of output — primarily tires for cars and heavy vehicles, alongside key feeder products, including rubber and carbon black — to the US and the GCC. The project will be set up in cooperation with Fit & Fix parent company Nile Projects and Trading.

Talabat expands its Yanmu presence

Talabat inaugurated the Middle East’s largest express commerce distribution center in Hassan Allam Utilities’ Yanmu East Logistics Park in Cairo, according to a cabinet statement. The 27k sqm facility has capacity for up to 1 mn items per day. It supports Talabat Mart’s network across 12 cities — expandable to 17 — and includes 75k storage locations. This is Talabat’s second facility in Yanmu after inaugurating a 22.4k sq distribution center last year with a daily capacity of up to 1.6 mn.

Tech’s doing the heavy lifting: The operation runs on real-time systems integrating inventory, retail, and supply chains, with in-house AI models forecasting demand, optimizing stock, and automating processes to minimize losses.

UAE expected to ramp up oil and gas investments after Opec exit

Watch this space

The UAE is widely expected to accelerate investments in oil and gas after its exit fromOpec and Opec+. Abu Dhabi is widely expected to accelerate upstream capacity, drilling, processing, storage, and export infrastructure, Arqaam Capital research head Jaap Meijer wrote on LinkedIn, with Fujairah a likely focus given the “strategic value of pipeline and export capacity outside the Strait of Hormuz.”

Capacity could climb fast, with output poised to hit 5 mn bbl / d in the near term — a longstanding 2027 target, up from 4.6-4.9 mn bbl / d today — and 6 mn bbl / d in the medium term, Meijer said. A Barclays note picked up by Reuters also said the UAE is likely to accelerate oil supply as it works its way out of the current crisis.

Lifting output to 5 mn bbl / d — from a pre-war 3.4 mn bbl / d — would add some USD 40 bn in annual gross oil revenue, supporting “fiscal revenues, government-related entity capex, domestic liquidity, and real GDP growth,” Meijer wrote.

Adnoc is already cashing in, sharply hiking its May Murban crude pricing to USD 110.75 / bbl from USD 69.45, Reuters reports, as crude benchmarks remain elevated due to the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Brent briefly hit USD 126 — its highest since 2022 — after reports of a prolonged US naval blockade on Iran, before cooling yesterday to USD 110.

Where do prices go from here? US President Donald Trump and Russia’s finance minister both expect the UAE’s Opec exit to push prices down by spurring more production. Goldman Sachs is more cautious, flagging medium-term upside supply risk as UAE output heads toward 3.8 mn bbl / d by this October.

German-French tankmaker KNDS is investigating a 2013 supply contract with Qatar over allegations of bribery. The “legacy transaction” so far does not show signs of “criminal misconduct” from any KNDS employees, with the investigation still underway. Allegations of misconduct to the tune of multi-mn EUR first surfaced in 2019, with Der Spiegel also recently publishing more details this year.

Monetary policy

Gulf central banks maintained their interest rates this week after the US Federal Reserve left its own rates on hold in what was Jay Powell’s final meeting as chair. Despite plenty of dissent at the Fed, the bank kept the policy rate in the 3.50%-3.75% range, citing persisting inflation and rising energy prices for the move, pointing to a “high level of uncertainty” stemming from the US-Iran war.

Sign of the times

The regional aluminum crisis did good things for Norsk Hydro’sbottom line, which came in higher than analyst expectations at NOK 7.13 bn (USD 770 mn). Norsk Hydro operates Qatalum as a joint venture with Qatar Aluminum Manufacturing Company.

Data point

7% — that’s the percentage of board seats held by women across the GCC’s 759 publicly listed companies, according to the 2026 GCC Board Gender Index report by Heriot-Watt University and Aurora50. That figure remained essentially flat y-o-y, with women’s board representation coming in at 6.9% in 2025.

The breakdown: Saudi Arabia is at the bottom of the GCC’s board gender diversity rankings, with women holding just 2.9% of the 2,014 available board seats in the Kingdom’s publicly listed companies. UAE tops the list with 15%, followed by Bahrain (10.5%), Oman (7%), Kuwait (5.6%), and Qatar (3.2%). Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the only two countries where women have secured seats across all sectors.

CALENDAR

May 2026

12 May — Qatar Economic Forum (through 14 May). Qatar

21 May — Central Bank of Egypt monetary policy decision. Egypt

25 May — Independence Day (public holiday, markets closed). Jordan

27-30 May — Eid Al Adha (public holiday, markets closed). Region-wide

28 May — Saudi Aramco ex-dividend date. Saudi Arabia

June 2026

7 June — OPEC+ ministerial meeting. Vienna/Virtual

9 June — King Abdullah II Accession Day (public holiday, markets closed). Jordan

10–14 June — Syria Buildex International Construction Exhibition. Syria

16-17 June — US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting.

July 2026

5 July — Independence Day (public holiday, markets closed). Algeria

9 July — Central Bank of Egypt monetary policy decision. Egypt

14 July — Republic Day (public holiday, markets closed). Iraq

23 July — Revolution Day (public holiday, markets closed). Egypt

25 July — Republic Day (public holiday, markets closed). Tunisia

28-29 July — US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting.

30 July — Throne Day (public holiday, markets closed). Morocco

August 2026

13 Aug — Women’s National Day. Tunisia

20 Aug — Revolution of the King and the People Day (public holiday, markets closed). Morocco

20 Aug — Central Bank of Egypt monetary policy decision. Egypt

21 Aug — Youth Day (public holiday, markets closed). Morocco

25 Aug — Prophet’s Birthday (public holiday, markets closed) — TBD. Region-wide

31 Aug-3 Sep — LEAP technology conference. Saudi Arabia

September 2026

7-9 Sep — AIM Congress. UAE

15-16 Sep — US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting.

15 Sep — IMF’s eighth review of Egypt’s USD 8 bn EFF arrangement. Egypt

16-17 Sep — Middle East Banking Innovation Summit. UAE

23 Sep — National Day (public holiday, markets closed). Saudi Arabia

24 Sep — Central Bank of Egypt monetary policy decision. Egypt

30 Sep-3 Oct — Cityscape Egypt 2026. Egypt

October 2026

3 Oct — National Day (public holiday, markets closed). Iraq

6 Oct — Armed Forces Day (public holiday, markets closed). Egypt

15 Oct — GCC Made in the Gulf Forum + Exhibition. TBD

25 Oct — Liberation Day (public holiday, markets closed). Libya

25-27 Oct — World Investment Forum 2026. Qatar

26-29 Oct — Future Investment Initiative. Saudi Arabia

27-28 Oct — US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting.

29 Oct — Central Bank of Egypt monetary policy decision. Egypt

November 2026

1 Nov — Revolution Anniversary (public holiday, markets closed). Algeria

2 Nov — Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition + Conference (ADIPEC) opens (through 5 Nov). UAE

6 Nov — Green March Anniversary (public holiday, markets closed). Morocco

16 Nov — Cityscape Global begins (through 19 Nov). Saudi Arabia

December 2026

17 Dec — Central Bank of Egypt monetary policy decision. Egypt

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