Split fortunes

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OPENING NOTE

Waiting for Elon

Good morning, wonderful people. We have a packed issue for you this morning, leading with a look at how Morocco and Egypt are picking up tourism business because of (not despite) the war in the Gulf. And while our fellow finance nerds around the world wait for news later today about how much of SpaceX Elon Musk wants to sell — and at what price — we have a quick primer for normals who can’t keep track of how the UAE, Saudi, and Qatar are positioned ahead of three AI IPOs that could together be worth north of USD 3 tn.

Humain has direct exposure here: The Saudi AI giant holds shares in SpaceX, a spokesperson tells us.

The IPO theme carries through to the the news well: Oman is set to test foreign appetite for fresh paper in the midst of a war — the inventively named Oman India Fertilizer Co. is set to go public on the MSX. It sells most of its output to India — and is a particularly rich dividend play. Saudi issuers can go to market and rely on deep domestic liquidity to take up the shares, but a big Oman offering will likely need foreign money to come in.

And we’ve got the latest on the war this morning, which saw Iran hit Bahrain and Kuwait overnight and the US attack targets across Iran. –Patrick

A tale of two markets

War rarely creates tourism winners in our region, but the Iran conflict may have done exactly that. While GCC and Levant tourism businesses grappled with flight disruptions, falling hotel occupancy, and USD bns in lost visitor spending, North Africa destinations quietly emerged as the region’s biggest beneficiaries, industry experts tell us.

“We saw demand shift toward Egypt and Morocco, almost immediately,” travel search engine Wego’s chief business officer, Mamoun Hmidan, tells EnterpriseAM, adding, “Many travelers who had planned to visit elsewhere in the region redirected.” Wego’s main customer base is in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Egypt.

This demand shift was particularly visible in Egypt, recording the strongest growth across flights, hotels, accommodations, and excursions on Wego's platform. “That translated into nearly 30% growth on Wego,” Hmidan says. “Egypt posted the strongest growth across every category we track. Morocco ranked second, but Egypt remained comfortably ahead,” he adds.

Gulf travelers were key in propping up demand on North African destinations, as many residents looked for a break from the war. Wego data shows Saudi Arabia and Kuwait emerged as Egypt’s largest source markets during the conflict period. Cairo and Egypt’s Mediterranean coast were thronged with Gulf visitors during last week’s Eid Al Adha break. Record-high ticket prices made Egypt particularly attractive as Gulf travelers opted for shorter-haul destinations rather than long-distance trips that carried higher costs and greater uncertainty.

Geographic proximity is key. Many travelers who were initially planning to go to the GCC looked for alternatives that are close to their initial destinations and are still offering sunshine, beaches, cultural attractions, and relatively short flight times. And North African destinations happened to tick most of those boxes. “People also became more hesitant about long-haul travel because they wanted the reassurance that if something happened, they would be closer to home,” Michael Melika, CEO of Dubai-based tourism and hospitality advisory Via Consultation, tells us.

Cultural familiarity also helps: For many travelers, particularly families, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia offered something increasingly valuable for GCC travelers during a period of geopolitical uncertainty: familiarity. “Gulf travelers increasingly gravitate toward destinations where they find the same language, appealing food, and a familiar culture,” Melika says.

And the thing about Egypt and Morocco is that they also come at a much lower cost than Europe. “At a time when airfares are rising and travelers are becoming more cautious, nearby destinations become much more attractive,” Melika tells EnterpriseAM.

For Egypt, the 30% rise in demand after mid-March was driven by both regional and international travelers, per Wego data. Traveling families were a key demographic, accounting for 55% of bookings made, while average stays stretched to roughly 10 days. Egypt’s standing as a core and timeless destination for GCC travelers also shone through. “Some destinations go through cycles of popularity, but Egypt has remained a constant one,” Melika says.

Morocco’s story looks slightly different. While the conflict provided an additional boost, Hmidan says Morocco’s recent growth is increasingly being driven by business travel as much as leisure tourism. “The upcoming World Cup 2030 is adding another layer of momentum. Projects are moving ahead, construction activity is picking up, and more travel is being driven by businesses exploring opportunities on the ground,” he adds.

Tunisia’s tourism market is also growing — but remains a smaller story: Wego recorded booking growth of roughly 4% for Tunisia in the weeks that followed the beginning of the war; in March, hotel occupancy in Tunis nearly doubled y-o-y. But Tunisia continues to lag behind Egypt and Morocco in overall visibility and traveler awareness. “Egypt has a clear historical identity, while Morocco has built a lifestyle and leisure identity… Tunisia still has not established a clear identity for either Europe or the GCC,” Melika says. Tunisia is most popular among European travelers, rather than GCC-based ones.

The North Africa resilience isn’t an accident

Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia weren’t accidental beneficiaries. Egypt welcomed nearly 19 mn tourists in 2025, a record year that saw arrivals rise 21% y-o-y. Morocco attracted 19.8 mn visitors, becoming Africa's most visited destination for the first time. Tunisia’s post-2015 tourism recovery has been slower, but tourism indicators have continued improving as European visitors returned, receiving roughly 11 mn visitors in 2024.

Covid’s key lesson? Travel never ceases completely. “Covid effectively gave tourism operators a free crash course in crisis management. One thing it proved is that the travel market across MENA and the GCC is incredibly resilient. People travel for all sorts of reasons — it's often a necessity, not a luxury. Tourism businesses are used to managing fluctuations in demand, which is why the sector remains so resilient,” Hmidan adds.

This has been the case in Lebanon, for example, which is among the hardest hit in the region. We previously reported that Lebanese hotels were hanging by a thread during the war — and that thread is essentially Lebanese expats visiting, journalists covering the war from Beirut, NGOs workers, and displaced folks from the south of the country.

The challenge isn’t just accommodating a dip in demand, but managing its sudden redistribution. Even when demand surged beyond expectations, as in the cases of Egypt and Morocco, businesses largely absorbed the increase without major disruption. “Hotels in Egypt typically run at around 70% to 75% occupancy through the year. Even when that climbed above 90%, it was still manageable. There was enough capacity,” Hmidan says.

That flexibility may be one of North Africa’s biggest competitive advantages. “You might feel some pressure at airports, passport control, or ground transportation. But those are operational issues. The infrastructure is there, the workforce is there, and operators know how to respond quickly. The more demand the region sees, the faster the sector adjusts,” Hmidan explains. “Tourism here is far more flexible than many people assume,” he adds.

What’s next

The big question now is whether North African destinations can turn this momentum into something that lasts. Melika argues that this will require active marketing and unlocking new markets and traveler segments. “The problem is that many countries still wait for tourists to come to them. They need to go to the tourists,” he says. Governments and businesses need to understand which source markets are growing to capitalize on and where the shortage is to address,” Melika adds. “[Many] countries regularly attend travel exhibitions and tourism conferences but often fail to follow up with sustained marketing campaigns, partnerships with travel agencies, or incentives that can convert interest into bookings,” Melika added.

For now, the tailwinds for Morocco and Egypt will continue up to 1Q 2027, Melika tells us. What happens after that is still hard to crack with forecasts. “No tourism trend lasts forever.”

Place your bets

SpaceX could announce the terms of its IPO as soon as this afternoon, with bankers expected to lift the lid on the price range and share count for what would be the largest listing ever as Elon Musk races to market before frontier model makers Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s going to be a lot of chatter in the days ahead about what the SpaceX IPO means for the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar: The three Gulf heavyweights have made a patchwork of investments in, with, and alongside SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

The cacophony of AI investment news in the regional press over the past two years has been a lot for tech-and-finance nerds like us to keep track of — let alone normals. Herewith, our primer on what you need to know about SpaceX, the IPO, which Gulf country has exposure to which model maker, and how their strategies have so-far differed.

What we know about the SpaceX IPO: Musk is believed to be seeking up to USD 75 bn — more than double the USD 29.4 bn Saudi Aramco raised in 2019 — at a valuation of at least USD 1.8 tn.

First, a caveat: SpaceX is not OpenAI or Anthropic. SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk’s xAI this past February, and anyone buying shares in the company is not getting exposure to a pure model-maker: You get rockets and satellite internet provider Starlink, plus an AI arm — xAI — whose consumer model, Grok, courts controversy. What’s more, SpaceX is increasingly behaving like an infrastructure landlord rather than a model lab: It just signed Anthropic, a direct rival, to a c. USD 15 bn-a-year lease on its Colossus supercomputer, with orbital data centres pitched as the next step. The Gulf’s single biggest “AI” bet is, right now, rocket-and-satellite company with a compute business bolted on.

#1- The UAE: No one in the region built earlier or broader, giving the Emirates four pillars that are regional leaders right now:

MBZUAI — the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first, is training talent and investing in research;
TII — the Technology Innovation Institute, is building the open-source Falcon models (with serious Arabic chops) and recently sold incredibly sophisticated cryptographic tech to a California company that counts Anthropic among its customers;
G42 — the Mubadala- and Microsoft-backed champion, builds models, data centers (via Khazna) and cloud compute (via Core42);
MGX — the sovereign AI fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, with c. USD 100 bn to deploy in opportunities around the world.

MGX is the only Gulf vehicle we think has equity in all three labs, having come into OpenAI’s 2025 round, Anthropic’s Series G, and xAI, now SpaceX. And it builds compute everywhere — the 1 GW Stargate UAE cluster in Abu Dhabi, a Buffalo site scaling to 60 MW on a USD 550 mn HSBC facility, and a French campus with Bpifrance, already Europe’s largest, now scaling to 3 GW from 1.4 GW as part of a USD 30-50 bn UAE push into French AI.

#2- Saudi Arabia’s strategy has been to own the stack on home soil. Rather than focusing on slices of the Big Four global labs (Google is vastly more important in that list than SpaceX), PIF built a single champion, Humain, and is assembling the “layers” in order — chips and data centers with Nvidia, AMD, and AWS; export licences from Washington; now the applications, including a Nvidia-powered move into Level 4 robotaxis this week. Its lab exposure runs through SpaceX: PIF holds just under 1% and is weighing a c. USD 5 bn anchor commitment to the IPO. Kingdom Holding and Prince Alwaleed have disclosed a combined 0.63%, worth more than USD 10 bn. And a Humain spokesperson confirmed to us that it, too, holds SpaceX shares. Notably, the Kingdom has no confirmed Anthropic stake and no OpenAI equity.

#3- Qatar: the quiet financial investor. QIA was the first Gulf money into Anthropic and has since doubled down, anchoring xAI’s Series E (so it, too, now holds SpaceX), and signing a national-AI partnership with OpenAI. It spreads capital for returns and access, without Saudi’s infrastructure ambition or the UAE’s all-of-the-above reach.

The days after SpaceX’s IPO will be decisive for the timing (and possibly even ability) of Anthropic and OpenAI to go to market. Anthropic has already filed for an IPO, and OpenAi is widely expected to follow suit. A solid first day that proves durable over the two weeks that follow will make Anthropic a lock for fall — and a slump could prove a buying opportunity for Gulf sovereigns convinced that AI is a key part of the future global economy.

But Gulf sovereigns also face some risk: We saw the other side of the West last month. By the time AI chipmaker Cerebras finally listed — surging 68% to a c. USD 95 bn valuation on the first day of trading — the UAE’s G42, once its largest backer and customer, had been pushed into non-voting shares and saw its share of Cerebras’ revenue cut to 24% from 85%. Why? To satisfy US national-security reviewers, making it a first mover that got squeezed.

Today, all of the Big Four frontier labs are US-domiciled, meaning everything from which chips can ship to our part of the world to whether sovereign-fund money is even welcome is all decided in Washington, not here. Our bet on the future AI economy is increasingly a bet on DC politics — a fact we think will make Chinese makers of open-weight models all the more attractive in the year to come.

And again…

Iran exchanged fresh attacks with its Gulf neighbors and the US overnight, after Tehran launched missiles at Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as “civilian mariners that were rightfully transiting regional waters.” None of Iran’s attacks made it to their targets: “Two Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait fell short or broke apart enroute, and three missiles launched at Bahrain were immediately intercepted by US and Bahrain air defense forces,” the US Central Command said.

The US retaliated with strikes on Qeshm Island, targeting an Iranian military ground control station.

Ostensibly missing from Iran’s target list: The UAE, which has otherwise borne the brunt of Tehran’s attacks throughout the war.

Meanwhile, Lebanon continues to get pummeled as Israel resumed its attacks in the country’s south, even as the two countries kicked off a fresh round of negotiations for a permanent ceasefire yesterday in Washington. Tel Aviv agreed to hold off on a planned attack in Beirut after US President Donald Trump intervened to avoid further escalations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue his war in south Lebanon, even as Iran has insisted that any ceasefire agreement must include Lebanon.

Opening the back door

Morocco is emerging as a critical hub in China’s green industrial strategy as the Iran war reshapes supply chains and energy security calculations, according to new research by Washington-based Stimson Centre. The report flags continued vulnerabilities — Morocco’s dependence on imported hydrocarbons and outdated grid infrastructure — despite ambitious decarbonization goals and rising foreign capital.

A convergence of ambitions: Since joining the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017, Morocco has drawn growing Chinese capital into renewables, battery production, and EV components.

The broader industrial pull: Chinese investment isn’t limited to green sectors. Medical manufacturer Jiangsu Aishelun broke ground last week on its first African plant at Mohammed VI Tanger Tech City — near the Tanger Med port complex — and is investing an additional EUR 15 mn in its Moroccan subsidiary to reach EUR 20 mn. The Tanger Tech City has become a focal point for inbound industrial investment.

SOUND SMART- What’s China doing in Morocco, anyway? A bunch of stuff. For starters, building plants there would allow Chinese firms to export to the EU under the bloc’s trade agreement with Morocco, sidestepping Brussels’ tariffs on made-in-China EVs. Morocco is already a key hub for automotive manufacturers ranging from Renault to Stellantis. Then there are batteries: Morocco sites on world-class phosphate reserves, which are key for battery production.

IN CONTEXT- Chinese companies are following the same playbook in Egypt, as we’ve previously noted, piling into manufacturing of everything from white goods and textiles to a wind turbine factory and a USD 2 bn carbon-neutral textile complex.

Chasing the divvy

Oman’s MSX is hoping for a shot in the arm (and an inflow of foreign investment) with a big IPO now on the starting line: The Oman India Fertilizer Co (Omifco), a 50-50 Omani-Indian JV, plans to list on the Muscat Stock Exchange (MSX). The IPO will see Omifco float 25% of its shares — the company has yet to say how much it hopes to raise. The opening of the order window later this month is pending regulatory approval, with the start of trading expected in July, Omifco said in its intention to float (pdf).

Just in time? Oman’s first IPO in 2026 will come after a difficult month in May that saw trading volumes fall 33% m-o-m and the MSX 30 index drop 7.3% — reversing a 10-month upward trend since July 2025. The slump came on the back of a wartime risk-off that included OQ Base Industries shares falling 10% after Saudi Arabia’s PIF sold a 3.75% stake just before Eid Al Adha. A listing of Omifco’s caliber could help restore trading volumes in the short term while driving bigger MSX capitalization over the longer term.

What does Omifco do? It runs the largest fertiliser complex in Oman — and one of the five biggest in the GCC — out of Sur Industrial City, converting cheap, long-term contracted Omani natural gas into anhydrous ammonia and granular urea. Its big money maker is urea, which accounted for nearly 93% of 2025 revenue. It’s also a big India play: The country bought 71% of Omifco’s urea and 61% of its ammonia in the three years ending in 2025, with Latin America buying 17%.

A familiar playbook: Existing shareholders are cashing-out risk, taking 100% of the proceeds from the listing — but they’re promising new stockholders guaranteed dividends for two years. That’s the same approach we’ve seen with Oman’s IPOs of state-owned companies over the last year. The company is signaling it will distribute OMR 71.2 mn (USD 185 mn) in profits from the current fiscal year and 90% of net profit (or a 3% step-up from the FY2026 dividend) through 2028.

Omifco wants to attract international investors: The offering is compliant with the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation S.

The numbers look good (when you look past the small matter of the Strait of Hormuz): USD 802.3 mn in 2025 revenue at a 50.6% EBITDA margin and a 40% net margin, with its plants running above their nameplate capacity and no debt on the balance sheet. Margins held up nicely in 1Q, which saw the impact of just one month of war.

Why we think this is one to watch: Saudi’s Tadawul notched a win with the successful IPO of IT services outfit Dar Al Balad, but it was a minnow. The bigger test is Mutlaq Al Ghowairi, where the order book opened just this week. Saudi IPOs are supported largely by domestic capital — foreigners have so far shown little appetite for Tadawul stocks. Oman has nowhere near the domestic liquidity that Saudi does, making the Reg S piece the thing to watch: Will foreign capital come into a stock — even one with fundamentals and a dividend policy as attractive as Omifco’s — while the war limps on?

ADVISORS- Bank Muscat and Société Générale are joint global coordinators, with Arqaam Capital and United Securities acting as joint bookrunners.

Muted

May was a broadly muted month for the region’s exchanges as continued disruption from the Strait of Hormuz and a shortened trading calendar thanks to Eid Al Adha weighed on markets. With roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG still routed through a stalled corridor, equities spent the month trading less on domestic fundamentals than on the headlines coming out of the region.

The result: A cluster of indices that finished close to flat. Bahrain (+0.2%) and Qatar (+0.1%) essentially treaded water, while Casablanca (+1.6%), Egypt (+1.7%), and Kuwait (+1.1%) eked out modest gains. The fewer trading sessions on either side of the Eid break only thinned the volumes that might otherwise have given the month more direction.

The two outliers on the upside sat well clear of the pack: Tunisia’s Tunindex led the region, gaining 9.4% and extending a run that has made it one of 2026’s standout performers. Tunindex is up 34.5% YTD, powered by financials and a domestic largely insulated from the oil-and-Hormuz narrative dominating the Gulf. Jordan was the next strongest, with the Amman bourse riding similar momentum that brought it up 4.4% last month.

At the other end, ADX (-0.9%) and DFM (-0.4%) finished in the red — a notable reversal for two markets that had led GCC gains earlier in the year before war risk and the supply shock began eating into valuations. The UAE’s heavily real-estate-and-financials-weighted indices proved more exposed to the regional risk premium than to any upside from firmer crude, leaving them as the month’s laggards even as oil-leveraged names elsewhere rallied.

Saudi Arabia captured the month’s split personality. TASI closed the month exactly where it started, ending May down a slim 0.55%. The flat headline hides an unusually messy story underneath: Oil-leveraged cyclicals ripped higher, while the banks that usually anchor the index were dumped.

“You had roughly half the market behaving like a commodity derivative and the other half quietly doing its job,” Aseel Al Aranki, research and analysis department manager at River Prime, tells EnterpriseAM. With some 10.5 mn bbl / d of regional production shut in, she added, “you’re no longer just watching oil. You’re watching whether missiles land near Saudi infrastructure.”

M&A all day

A couple of juicy M&A stories and boring (for normals) but important (for us finance nerds) regulatory changes in Saudi lead the column this morning on what’s shaping up to be a very busy week for Markets + Deals news. Look for the pace to continue this month, war or not, as bankers and lawyers push to close transactions before the summer slowdown begins once school is out.

UP FIRST- Could Uber end up owning all of Careem again? Telco-turned-tech-investor e& is selling a 12.5% stake in Careem’s super-app unit, Careem Technologies, to Uber for USD 100 mn — cutting its holding to 37.53% from 50.03% and attaching matched put-and-call options exercisable between December 2031 and January 2032 that open a path for Uber to take the whole thing, per a press release (pdf).

The history: Uber had owned Careem’s ride-hailing business outright since its USD 3.1 bn 2019 buy, and in 2023 sold e& a 50.03% stake in the spun-out super app for USD 400 mn. The news comes as Uber chases another rival — Germany’s Delivery Hero — after tabling a USD 38.29-a-share proposal and building a 37% position ahead of a possible takeover.

AND- International Holding Company and Mohamed Alabbar are both circling troubled food producer IFFCO, which is buckling under roughly USD 2 bn in debt and creditor insolvency filings, Bloomberg reports. Nobody has yet made a formal bid, but Alabbar has written to the board and creditor banks signaling interest in the whole business, which includes assets potentially worth several bn USD spanning food, packaging, chemicals, and logistics across 50 countries.

It’s a food security play: IFFCO’s UAE plants are among the more important nodes in the Emirates’ supply chain.

Speaking of food security: AD Ports is buying Brazilian agri-bulk terminal operator Corredor Logística e Infraestrutura (CLI) for USD 835 mn (c. AED 3.1 bn) — its first owned port infrastructure in Brazil, according to a disclosure (pdf). The transaction gives AD Ports exposure to the supply side of the world’s biggest sugar, soybean, and corn exporter. Rival DP World has been building out Santos on the same thesis. The AD Ports transaction should close in the second half of this year.

M&A IN CONTEXT- Saudi M&A defied the regional slump in 1Q, logging 24 deals worth USD 689 mn, a 4% y-o-y increase in volume even as MENA-wide value slid to USD 23.3 bn from USD 31.3 bn, per Ansarada (pdf). The Public Investment Fund was the big driver. “The conflict may be reshaping timelines, but it’s not reshaping the region’s thirst for M&A,” Ansarada’s Justin Smith told Arab News. One caveat worth flagging: Data providers disagree on the depth of the slowdown, with LSEG putting MENA M&A far lower at USD 18.8 bn, with inbound down 90% to a 10-year low.

Tadawul is drafting a dedicated framework for securitization and asset-backed issuances, splitting debt-listing rules from equities and adding disclosure tailored to structured deals, according to proposed amendments (pdf) open for consultation until 14 June. The point, Fitch’s Bashar Al Natoor says, is to let investors take risk on a defined asset pool rather than the issuer — the precondition for a genuine asset-backed sukuk market, building on last year’s SPE reforms.

This sounds boring to non-finance nerds, but it could be really big: Securitization is the lifeblood of consumer finance and the wider non-banking financial sector — in Egypt, it’s what funds the NBFI industry, with the banks as the primary buyers of the paper. A deeper, better-regulated Gulf template than what’s in place today is one other Gulf regulators will be watching.

SOUND SMART- Securitization is the art of turning lots of small, illiquid loans into one tradable security. A lender — say a consumer-finance or leasing firm — bundles thousands of car loans, installment plans, or lease receivables into a single pool, then sells bonds or sukuk backed by the monthly payments that pool throws off. The lender gets a lump of cash today instead of waiting years to collect it and recycles that straight into new lending.

Two big real estate moves to keep an eye on: In Saudi, the Royal Commission for Makkah City awarded SAR 13.3 bn (USD 3.5 bn) of redevelopment work across six districts spanning 2.7 mn sqm. Interestingly each scheme runs through a closed-ended real estate fund rather than a straight contract. We’re taking this as officials trying to bring in institutional capital rather than further stressing the state budget or further crowding the private-sector out of the banking system.

MEANWHILE- Egyptian real estate giant TMG is pushing into Iraq, with a unit there securing land and a license for a USD 10 bn, 12.8 mn sqm megaproject in Baghdad Financial and Economic City, targeting USD 18.8 bn in sales and USD 108 mn in recurring annual revenue. It follows real estate developer Ora and snackfoods giant Edita into Iraq and joins TMG’s USD 10.7 bn Banan City in Riyadh and USD 4.7 bn foray into Oman.

From the Dept. of Dumb Moves: S&P Dow Jones Indices has opened a consultation (pdf) on demoting Egyptian equities to frontier status, citing market-access and capital-mobility concerns. Consultations are open until 17 July, with any change effective at the September 2027 reconstitution. The mechanical hit is small (Egypt is just 0.12% of the S&P EM BMI), but the signal is not: it comes while the EGX is deepening with a derivatives market, short-selling, and a state IPO pipeline that includes Misr Life and Banque du Caire.

Our take: The case is … non-existent? Nobody else we know of is flagging access or capital-mobility problems right now: the carry trade clears every day and FTSE reaffirmed Egypt’s emerging-market status only three months ago. This reads more like a box-ticking review than a real warning, but the optics will frustrate policymakers in Cairo.

Autonomous-delivery startup CargoX has come out of “stealth” with a USD 250 mn raise led by Abu Dhabi’s BlueFive Capital, per a press release. It’s being run by former Talabat CEO Tomaso Rodriguez, who took that company through its USD 2 bn 2024 IPO, and is now at the helm of a driverless-freight platform already piloting on UAE roads. For BlueFive it’s the second mobility bet in as many months after a 4 9% stake in Massar Solutions from Taqa. This looks more and more like a regional mobility roll-up taking shape in real time.

Adia is adding insurance software to its global portfolio, with a unit of the fund taking a significant minority stake in Sapiens, an Israeli-founded insurance-software firm, according to a press release.

Jordan’s Amman Stock Exchange has gone live on Tabadul, the ADX-anchored cross-market platform, becoming its seventh exchange and letting investors trade both bourses through a single pipe.

Cairo VC firm A15 is days from closing its tenth exit — and has already returned 10.2x DPI (cash actually back to investors versus what they put in) with the fund still active, Managing Partner Karim Beshara tells our Egypt desk — that’s good enough to make the fund in the top decile globally. You can read the full story here.

ALSO WORTH KNOWING

UK-based energy services company Petrofac closed the sale of its UAE unit, PetrofacEmirates, to a group led by US investment firm Mason Capital Management and London-based hedge fund manager Pearlstone Alternative, according to a press release.

Green Palm Bidco — the BlackRock-led vehicle that bought into Aramco’s Jafurah gas field — has opened books on a debut USD bond worth as much as USD 2 bn, Global Capital reports. HSBC, Citi, and JP Morgan are running the transaction.

EBRD is mulling up to USD 200 mn in finance for UAE-based Alcazar Energy’s 500 MW Ras Ghareb wind complex in Egypt — up to USD 100 mn each for the NIAT and Rasgha projects (here and here) — covering much of the USD 450 mn debt behind the USD 600 mn build, on a 25-year grid offtake. The GCC has accounted for more than 60% of wind and solar FDI in Egypt since 2015.

BinDawood Holding completed its acquisition of a 51% stake in Vaza Food for SAR 217.9 mn (USD 58 mn), per a Tadawul disclosure. It’s the retail giant’s first push upstream into food processing.

Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) cleared a regulatory hurdle on its USD 2.2 bn acquisition of France’s Aluminium Dunkerque, with the European Commission signing off.

Positron AI, a US maker of hardware optimized for AI inference rather than training that has raised more than USD 300 mn including a USD 230 mn Series B, has opened its first office outside the US at the DIFC.

Market Snapshot

Tadawul +0.1% • ADX -0.3% • DFM -0.7% • EGX30 -0.2%

Brent USD 95.99 / bbl • Gold USD 4,517 / oz • USD / SAR 3.75 • USD / EGP 51.2

Relentless

DP World overseas expansions never stop

DP World is putting more weight behind its LatAm trade platform: Dubai-based ports operator DP World and the Dominican Republic government will invest an additional USD 100 mn to expand warehousing and logistics infrastructure at the DP World Freetrade zone in Caucedo. The new investments will tighten port-freezone-logistics integration at a site poised to serve US-bound manufacturing alongside Latin America and the Caribbean.

DP World already committed some USD 760 mn to its Dominican Republic operations, where its capacity stands at 2.5 mn TEUs. The new expansion is expected to raise container handling capacity to around 3.1 mn TEUs, attract USD 3.9 bn in FDI, and drive USD 4 bn in manufacturing output.

Oman lines up its Saudi border dry port

Egyptian EPC contractor Edecs Group was awarded the construction package for a dry port and veterinary quarantine facility at Ezad IP3 in Oman's Al Dhahirah Economic Zone (Ezad), partnering with local firm Assarain Group. The 388 sq km zone sits roughly 20 km from the Rub Al Khali border crossing with Saudi Arabia and approximately 105 km from Ibri Industrial City.

Grand SLAM

Bahrain’s Mumtalakat is anchoring a French private equity fund focused on sport, luxury, arts, and music (SLAM) — billed as the first PE vehicle dedicated to those sectors — under a partnership with Paris-based TRAIL. As part of the agreement, TRAIL will open a Manama office that will serve as its GCC hub, supporting portfolio companies and enabling regional capital raising.

The mandate: Develop SLAM’s sectors in Bahrain and across the GCC through direct investments and by helping the fund’s portfolio companies expand regionally.

War threatens India’s auto exports and margins

Indian auto exporters are under strain as they struggle to ship their products to their core market: MENA+. Rising costs and disrupted export flows — longer transit times, higher freight and ins. premiums, currency volatility, and expensive raw materials — are weighing on manufacturers’ margins and could prompt “selective price hikes to partly offset cost pressures,” Rohan Kanwar Gupta, vice president at ICRA, tells EnterpriseAM.

MENA+ countries are vital export markets for India’s vehicle industry, making up 20-25% of overall exports and acting as a crucial gateway to Africa and beyond. “Any prolonged disruption due to the ongoing Middle East conflict could therefore moderate export volumes for Indian OEMs, especially if shipping timelines, container availability, or route visibility remain constrained,” Gupta notes. India’s passenger vehicle exports rose 17.5%y-o-y to 905k units in FY 2026, with demand steady across the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

A balancing act is in the works: Manufacturers will need to weigh hikes against the risk of dampening demand, likely leaning on cost controls, supply-chain adjustments, and alternate routing before passing the full cost burden onto overseas customers.

The outlook: The disruption could become a material credit risk if it leads to “sustained moderation in export volumes, margin compression, and elevated working capital intensity,” he tells us. However, Gupta thinks the risk has so far been limited to “intermittent supply-chain bottlenecks rather than an industry-wide production halt.”

Al Zaidi declares war on organized corruption in Iraq: Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi set up the Supreme Sovereign Council for Integrity, Oversight, and Recovery of Public Funds — a new council tasked with investigating and cracking down on organized corruption in government — after he said he was offered a USD 200 mn bribe by a government official to cover up for embezzlement in the Oil Ministry.

The backdrop: The announcement comes after Iraq’s deputy oil minister for refining affairs Adnan Al Jumaili was arrested Saturday on corruption charges, amid media speculation that Al Jumaili was the official that Al Zaidi referred to. Communications Minister Mostafa Sanad confirmed the arrest on his Facebook page, accusing Al Jumaili of embezzling ministry funds to finance political parties.

Some are cheering, others are skeptical: While some pundits are warning corruption in Iraq is too big and systemic to be combated with an investigative council and a single arrest, Al Zaidi’s allies are positioning the effort as crucial for the country’s economic reform. “Combating organized corruption is one of the essential conditions for the success of economic reform programs,” Al Zaidi’s financial advisor Mazhar Salih told INA. “[It] also contributes to raising the efficiency of resource allocation, improving the quality of public services, and increasing the state’s ability to mobilize non-oil revenues, which supports efforts towards economic diversification and financial sustainability,” Salid added.

Sign of the times

Libya’s efforts to expand brownfield production are proving to be a big windfall for the state-owned National Oil Corporation (NOC) amid sky-high global oil prices. The NOC generated some USD 4 bn in revenues from crude sales and royalties last May, its highest monthly figure in over 11 years, Chairman Masoud Suleiman said earlier this week. The May top line is a 48% m-o-m increase, and more than double January and February revenues, as well as 2025’s monthly average, by our math.

Background: Investors are returning to Libya’s oil and gas sector despite wider market risks linked to fragile security and banking accessibility, we previously reported. Investments in repairs and ramping up production in brownfield projects were likely helpful for Libya, which successfully raised production this year to 1.4 bbl / d — up from an average of 1.3 bbl / d in 2025. Libya targets producing some 1.6 bb / d in 2026, before ramping up to 2 bb / d in 2027.

CALENDAR

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

11 June — Central Bank of Turkey monetary policy decision. Turkey

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

21-24 June — Afreximbank Annual Meetings. Egypt

July 2026

2 July — Parliamentary elections. Algeria

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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