Good morning, wonderful people, and happy Friday to you all. We have a packed issue for you, with a look at the latest in Saudi’s drive to dethrone Egypt as the regional entertainment hegemon; the rundown on the regional competition to build a domestic industry to make components for wind farms; and a look at whether Saudi companies are getting flagged for violations of Saudization hiring mandates that they haven't necessarily committed.
How we’re planning to spend our weekend: Playing withGLM 5.2, the open-source AI model from Z.ai that’s backed in part by Aramco’s Prosperity 7 venture unit. We loved Claude Fable 5 for the couple of days we had access before the Trump administration forced Anthropic to pull the model, and with the White House now asking OpenAI to stagger the release of its latest offerings so the US government can vet users? Open-weights tech is looking more interesting than ever.
Better yet: Z.ai claims that (a) setting aside Fable 5, GLM 5.2 has pretty much caught up to Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest models when it comes to coding and longer agentic workflows, and (b) that it costs a tiny fraction of what you’d pay to run the same tasks on Claude’s top Opus models. And then there’s Kimi and Deepseek, which have also narrowed the gap with the US frontier labs.
The catch, for some: All three companies based in China, and the prospect of Chinese tech making inroads into the GCC saw Washington pressure the UAE to turn its back on Beijing as a condition of having access to the latest chips and models.
With tech insiders now openly debating whether we’re looking at an AI-model price war or the frontier builders going for premium pricing (see the WSJ and the FT), there’s never been a better time to experiment a bit.
We’re also going to spend the weekend mulling whether we really need that new Mac after Apple raised its prices for Macs and iPads yesterday by 20%, citing the rising cost of RAM as data center builders snap up every stick they can find.
Also on our weekend nerd list: Diving deeper into Chinese EVs after the United States banned Polestar (the Swedish EV maker owned primarily by China’s Li Shufu) and amid news that one in 10 new cars sold in Europe last month was Chinese. –Patrick
It’s an increasingly easy call for any producer weighing where to shoot their next big Arabic-language film: Saudi Arabia refunds well over half of qualifying local spend, owns the region’s fastest-growing box office, and increasingly controls the streaming ecosystem that earn a film its money after the in-cinemas run. 7 Dogs, the most expensive Arabic film ever made at a reported USD 70 mn, is the proof of concept for winning formula: Saudi capital, studio, and intellectual property — and Egyptian stars.
Trace the capital and you land on a sovereign wealth fund: 7 Dogs was produced by Sela Studios, which is owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF). It’s backed by the General Entertainment Authority (GEA), was a feature of Riyadh Season, and shot at AlHisn Big Time Studios in Riyadh.
That should worry Cairo, the historical capital of Arab Cinema. Egypt’s entire 2025 box office closed at around USD 37 mn, roughly the cost of that one Saudi production (USD 40 mn). While the film features two Egyptian leads, its deep-pocketed producers splurged on talent elsewhere, bringing in Moroccan-Belgian filmmaking duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, best known for their work on the Bad Boys franchise.
Why it matters: 7 Dogs is the third major film to run the same playbook of Saudi capital and Egyptian stars, but with the Saudi producer then owning the IP going forward. Saudi Arabia is now the principal export market for Egyptian cinema, with Egyptian titles grossing USD 53 mn in the Kingdom last year, almost 50% more than their domestic takings.
Front one: Capital
Saudi Arabia has already won this battle. The entertainment push is an economic diversification play with clear fiscal targets: lift household entertainment spending from 2.9% to 6% of expenditure, recoup some of the bns of SAR the kingdom loses to outbound tourism, and build a sector contributing 4.2% of GDP and 450k jobs by 2030. Every film shot in-Kingdom drives demand for hotels, transport, catering, and crew while showcasing locations including AlUla that Saudi policymakers hope will one day attract holidaymakers from all over the world — not just paid influencers. Cinema is a development instrument.
Saudi officials are also looking to make their incentive program both more lucrative and a lot easier to navigate. The Saudi Film Commission raised its cash rebate to 60% of eligible spend at Cannes in May 2026, well above major European rebates and Asia-Pacific programmes. The headline rate isn’t the only change: The earlier 40% scheme, launched in 2022, was widely considered difficult to navigate — slow disbursement and murky approvals that producers complained about for years. The 2026 overhaul is supposed to pair the higher rate with faster payouts, a financial-audit guide, and a cleaner application process. Commission CEO Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Qahtani framed it as a repositioning, not just a rate hike: “We want to be not just the most generous incentive, but also the most agile one.”
SOUND SMART- The Saudi rebate covers a broad range of eligible spend, including producer and director fees, screenplay rights, lead actor fees, set design, post-production, and even domestic travel. At 60%, a USD 40 mn production spending mostly in-Kingdom claws back USD 24 mn from the state.
Would-be producers will want to get to know the Cultural Development Fund. By October 2025, it had deployed over USD 142 mn across cultural industries (44% of it targeting films) and backed projects expected to add USD 533 mn to GDP and 6.9k jobs. It has since signed two dedicated film funds totalling USD 200 mn, unveiled a USD 270 mn co-lending programme with private lenders, and announced funding vehicles worth a combined SAR 3 bn (USD 933 mn) that officials in Riyadh hope will convince private investors to co-invest alongside state vehicles.
Egypt, by contrast, has spent the decade past absorbing EGP depreciation thatslashedthe hard-currency value of its box office to c. USD 36 mn in 2025 from USD 59.6 mn six years earlier. Storied production houses have been choked by high interest rates and, until recently, an FX crisis that put a USD 40 mn production budget well out of reach. And there’s no Egyptian instrument that competes with the CDF.
Talent: Egypt leads, but it’s leaking
This is the front Egypt still wins — and the one Saudi Arabia is working hardest to close. Egypt’s edge is cultural reach, built on a historical first-mover advantage. It flooded the region with films and music for so many decades that its dialect became the one every Arab audience grew up understanding. “The Egyptian dialect is the one understood across all Arab countries. Wherever you go, they understand you,” veteran sound engineer Ibrahim Abdel-Aziz tells us.
Saudi Arabia is absorbing Egyptian expertise, but Saudization is a key mandate, as it is in so many other sectors of the Saudi economy. “If we bring in external talent, we mandate that two or three Saudi professionals train directly under them,” Aymen Khoja, founder of Saudi production studio AK Pictures, tells us “It allows local talent to absorb the know-how and ultimately spearhead their own projects.”
Egyptian producers cannot compete with the premium Saudi is willing to pay for talent. “When a major [actor] receives USD 2 mn abroad for a film — alongside luxury accommodations, a private jet, and seven-star hotels — they will refuse an Egyptian producer offering a standard local wage. Convincing them to return to lower local rates becomes incredibly difficult,” an industry insider tells us. A better-capitalised buyer bids up the price of talent until the weaker one can no longer afford its own stars — that’s the reality today for most players in the Egyptian industry.
Then there’s distribution
Cairo is losing here, too. For decades, the Gulf was where Egyptian films made their money outside Egypt. Now, the Gulf is building its own distribution ecosystem. “Historically, most of our external distribution relied on the Gulf market. Now the Gulf states are developing self-sufficient ecosystems. Our external distribution network is severely diminished. We failed to secure alternative channels in East Asia, Latin America, or other markets,” the well-known Egyptian film critic Gamal Abdel-Kader says. Now, that export market is turning from a customer into a competitor.
“We now have roughly 65 cinema multiplexes across the Kingdom, with our screen count pushing past 400. We are nowhere near peak growth yet,” Khoja says.
The Saudi advantage is even deeper when it comes to streaming. In July 2025, MBC Group — Saudi-owned and a major regional broadcaster — struck the first Netflix bundle deal in MENA: Its MBCNOW platform gives subscribers a package that includes Shahid, Netflix, and MBC's 17 TV channels in one subscription the company claims costs a bit more than 20% less than buying them all individually. Streaming is where a film earns its money long after it leaves cinemas — Saudi is buying that up, too.
The break-even math shows why it matters: A film typically needs to gross between 2x and 2.5x its budget to break even, because cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket before you even factor in marketing costs. On a USD 40 mn production, post-theater streaming deals are critical.
Saudi has global ambitions
Abdel-Kader argues that the real value in productions like 7 Dogs is global marketing for the Saudi film industry. “We are spending at this massive production scale and bringing all these big names together to distribute the film globally — not because it’s a cinematic masterpiece — but to tell the world, ‘Look, we have Al-Hisn Studios and top-tier logistics capabilities.’”
Khoja, on the other hand, thinks there is a need for more long-game thinking on this front. “Distributors are focused primarily on maximising returns across Saudi Arabia and the GCC, and if they secure a sale in Egypt, they consider it a bonus. They look at the cost of traveling to Cannes to pitch European platforms for a EUR 10k or EUR 20k deal and think it isn't worth the journey. But building long-term value requires establishing those international pipelines early.”
So, what does the scoreboard look like?
The competition looks settled in some places, in flux in others. Saudi Arabia is steadily using its capital advantage to build up distribution and ownership advantage. Egypt still leads on talent and dialect reach, but those are assets it is renting out rather than monetising at scale — and the wage competition and Saudi localization efforts suggest the lead narrows each year it goes unaddressed. Whether this ends as integration or diverging competition depends less on Riyadh, whose strategy is clear and well-funded, and more on whether Cairo treats cinema as the export industry it once had.
The best way Egypt can capitalize on a market of more than 110 mn people who love entertainment? Innovate — and that’s going to mean embracing competition. “Egypt currently lacks true market competition due to a monopoly by a single company over drama and film production. When one entity controls production, distribution, and theaters, innovation halts,” Abdel-Kader says. For that to change, Cairo needs smart policy support that empowers the private sector to participate more actively — another policy choice where Saudi is ahead.
Egypt’s bid to build a domestic wind turbine industry may be taking its first baby steps: Chinese renewables manufacturer Sany Group has signed a memorandum that could see it build Egypt’s first wind turbine factory and a 2GW wind farm in the Gulf of Suez, the Egyptian cabinet said in a statement. Neither Egypt nor Sany have confirmed how much the plant will cost or when it might open, but our Egypt desk reported earlier this month that the company will sink more than USD 300 mn into the factory, which is set to be built in the Suez Canal Economic Zone.
Why it matters: Egypt is the latest bidder in what could become a four-way regional contest to build a manufacturing base for wind power components. Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Oman are all going down the same road — each leaning on the Chinese for the technology and each pitching itself as an export platform that feeds turbine components into Europe and Africa.
The goal is moving up the value chain from hosting wind farms — which the region has done for more than a decade — to making the hardware. The open question is whether each can build a truly localized industry or just host assembly lines that help Chinese producers secure access to tricky markets.
SOUND SMART- Wind turbines are a complex business. Localizing the full manufacturing stack usually happens in a predictable order, set by how hard each part is to move and to make. Towers go first, as studies into localization efforts in other markets, like South Africa, show. They’re hollow steel, which makes them easier to make and ship, as Ras Ghareb Wind Energy CEO Hans Bruins told us earlier this year, saying moving one from plant to installation was “basically transporting a lot of air.” Blades come next. At around 100 m, they’re costly to truck and easily damaged in transit, so the logistics case for local production is strong even though they’re harder to build. The nacelle — generator, gearbox, and control systems — come last. It’s the most technologically complex and capital-intensive input, and by IRENA's count, the part that needs the most manufacturing work, accounting for about half the labor in a wind farm’s main components.
Morocco is a frontrunner today: Siemens Gamesa opened a blade plant in Tangier back in October 2017, billed as the first wind-turbine-blade factory in Africa and the Middle East. Since then, more players have entered Morocco, targeting blades and the components that go into their making. Chinese blade maker Aeolon opened its first factory outside its home market at Nador West Med port-linked industrial zone, with an investment of around EUR 220 mn good enough to allow it to make 600 blade sets a year for sale to European, African, and Middle Eastern markets. Spanish components supplier Incom is now working on its third plant in Tangier — it entered the Moroccan market in 2020 to serve Siemens Gamesa’s industrial operations. About 65% of Incom’s output in Morocco is now shipped to the US (where the Trump administration has since decided it really, really doesn’t like wind power).
Saudi Arabia has the highest localization targets, but it’s yet to build the factory: The Kingdom is the region's largest wind market by ambition, saying it wants to install 40 GW of wind power out of a targeted total 130 GW of renewables by 2030. In 2024, it put its sovereign muscle behind manufacturing, and the PIF's RELC formed a JV with China’s second largest turbine producer Envision Energy as well as Saudi private sector player Vision Industries to explore making everything for the wind supply chain. And while Saudi Arabia has the most aggressive localization mandate in the region for renewable energy at 75% by 2030, the Kingdom is yet to announce any projects. The RELC JV has been silent since it was announced in 2024 signing, for example, and the kingdom still imports its turbines through Jeddah and Dammam, the only two ports that can handle the oversized cargo.
Oman was first in the Gulf to actually break ground. Mawarid Turbine Company, a subsidiary of state energy group OQ, lunched the first phase of a turbine plant at the Duqm special economic zone in April 2025 — an initial ticket above USD 200 mn, up to ~1 GW of annual capacity, and technology licensed from China's Shanghai Electric. Crucially, Oman solved the demand side at the same time — OQ's renewables arm will take equity stakes in the wind projects that buy the turbines, locking in a pipeline of roughly 1.1 GW across Duqm, Mahout, and Sadah. The project is planned to launch this year, but the details are sparse on what the exact turbine component that will be produced in the plant — reports are saying the plant will make 6.3 MW and 9.6 MW turbines
Egypt arrives with the 2 GW headline and little else nailed down. The Sany factory’s first phase will reportedly supply a 1 GW wind project in the Gulf of Suez, with other components imported until local lines run. That staging is normal — wind localization is a sequenced game.
REMEMBER- The wind factory is one piece of a wider Egyptian localization push that relies heavily on China’s world-leading technologies. On a January visit to Beijing, Electricity Minister Mahmoud Esmat oversaw a run of MoUs through state-linked Kemet: a USD 500 mn, 5 GW solar cell and module complex with GCL, a USD 200 mn, 5 GWh battery factory with Cornex, and Egypt’s first inverter and grid-connection plant with TBEA. Separately, China's Sungrow is building a 10 GWh battery plant in the SCZONE, the first of its kind in MEA. The Sany turbine deal extends that pattern into the hardest segment to localize.
The catch is the same everywhere: a factory is only bankable if the demand and the financing are in place. The chain of events is simple in project finance: An attractive tariff paid by the state utility on solid long-term offtake agreements attracts the developers, who then ask, “Can I buy the components in-market, or do I need to import?”
The demand-side lock is where the region splits: Oman has tied its demand to its factory through OQ's equity stakes, and Saudi Arabia has tied a hard 75% localization percentage to get industrial funding — while Egypt has a softer target of up to 60% local content, which may be up for a revision soon.
As the experience in Brazil shows, it’s all going to boil down to policy. Over roughly a decade, Brazil went from importing turbines to making about 80% of them domestically — on the back of a single instrument. Development bank BNDES made cheap project financing conditional on local content. Brazil ended up with a deep manufacturing base and it forced players like Vestas, Suzlon, Siemens, and others, who were locked out of a multi-USD bns market for some time, to localize. India built a comparable base over a longer arc on the back of Suzlon and “Make in India” local-content rules.
Saudi companies are getting flagged for violations in Saudization hiring mandates they haven't necessarily committed — and bad data is to blame, Mohamed Akkar, the CEO of payroll and compliance platform Jisr, tells EnterpriseAM.
How does this happen? Many establishments are comfortably in compliance with their overall Saudization rate, but are still receiving violation notices, because the 2026 reforms made the calculation far more granular and far less forgiving of messy records, Akkar explains.
REMEMBER- The screws tightened across the board when the new Nitaqat Mutawar cycle began. As we reported in April, the Human Resources Ministry expanded its 100% Saudization mandate to 69 job types and gave companies until 4 October to localize middle-management and specialist roles.
SOUND SMART- Nitaqat — Arabic for “bands” or “zones” — is the Kingdom’s Saudization rating system: companies are scored on their share of Saudi staff against a target set for their sector and size, then sorted into colored tiers. Red means non-compliant, with visa issuance and renewals frozen and expat staff free to transfer to a rival without their employer’s sign-off. The green tiers (low, mid, high) mean compliant, with smoother processing and the right to poach from competitors in the red band. Platinum is the top tier; the 2026 changes scrapped the middle “yellow” tier, so borderline firms now drop straight into red.
The tier system got an update earlier this year: The new three-year phase that took effect in late April (the same ones that scrapped the yellow tier) raised the general salary floor to SAR 4k from SAR 3k, widened profession-level quotas to 269 roles, and made Qiwa contract documentation mandatory from 15 April.
The macro picture says the localization drive is working. The program localized some 550k jobs in three years, we were told in April. Jisr — whose platform handles payroll and compliance for roughly 800k employees, around 7-8% of the private-sector workforce — recorded that 51% of new hires across its client base between January 2024 and June 2026 were Saudi nationals. For a private sector long built on expat labor, that's the balance tipping.
So why the violation notices? Because the expanded profession-specific quotas mean a company can sit in green on its headline rate while breaching in a single department — and since April, only Saudi employees with contracts documented on Qiwa count toward the calculation at all. “When we looked into it, we saw that there were some employees categorized under the marketing department, but the reality was that they were in a different department entirely,” Akkar says.
Retention is now a pressure point, particularly in labor-intensive sectors like retail, where the higher Saudization bar has made local talent harder to both attract and keep, Akkar says. This, in turn, has made offering competitive salaries in the sector a de facto compliance tool.
By the sector: Jisr’s data shows the bulk of Saudi new hires between January 2024 and June 2026 were concentrated in food & beverages (17%), general services (12.5%), retail, wholesale and distribution (11%), construction and building (9%), healthcare and medical services (6%), and contracting (5.5%).
The missing middle: While Jisr is seeing Saudization quotas being filled across employment levels, “the middle layer is historically where we normally see some gaps when looking at the data,” Akkar says.
What’s next: The current Saudization cycle runs through 2028, with the Kingdom targeting more than 340k additional localized private-sector jobs by then, and the Saudization benchmarks are scheduled to rise for most activities over the next two years. A company sitting in in the middle of the green band today can slide toward low green without changing a single hire, which means the data-hygiene problem Akkar describes gets more expensive, not less.
Gulf countries are pushing ahead with what we think will be a decade-long buildout of redundant and hardened infrastructure — and a parallel investment in capabilities — as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar absorb the lessons of the past four months.
The Strait of Hormuz is “a genuine threat,” and the only durable answer is to build pipelines that carry Middle East oil and gas to market without going through it, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne argued at a Paris energy conference this week. Pouyanne reached back a century for precedent, to the Iraq-Syria pipeline Total built in the 1920s: “If our predecessors did it 100 years ago, I believe we should be capable of doing it again today,” he said.
The Hormuz shock has turned Gulf energy infrastructure — pipelines, ports, storage, domestic gas — from cost centers into strategic assets. Pair it with the parallel build-out in defense and artificial intelligence capabilities (including the hardening of data centers) as well as other infrastructure and you can expect bankers and lawyers to be generating fees that will put today’s newborns into private school through their A-levels.
Three deals this week show the infrastructure leg of it moving:
#1-AD Ports is buying up the connective tissue. The Abu Dhabi-listed AD Ports Group is lifting its stake in Dubai-based feeder operator Global Feeder Shipping (GFS) to 81% from 51%, paying AED 1.1 bn to exercise a call option struck at the same enterprise valuation it agreed in early 2024, according to a press release (pdf). GFS kept cargo moving through the Hormuz disruption when other operators pulled back, and AD Ports has spent the year buying fresh exposure in Brazil, Europe, Africa, and the Middle Corridor, though it has run into obstacles where other infrastructure owners aren’t interested in parting with assets that ADP covets.
#2- Etihad Energy is building outside the strait. The company formerly known as Gulf Navigation is putting USD 300-350 mn into a 15k bbl/d refinery in Fujairah, its first move downstream, according to a DFM disclosure (pdf). It will turn naphtha into Euro V gasoline and other higher-value products. The refinery is part of a broader AED 1.5 bn, three-year plan that targets roughly 28% of Fujairah’s storage market, CEO Saif Al Hazaymeh told CNBC Arabia. Fujairah sits on the Gulf of Oman side of Hormuz, and the UAE has spent the year treating it as strategic infrastructure.
#3- And global energy majors have appetite for more Gulf gas assets. BP has signed a concession agreement with Adnoc and partners to develop the Bab Gas Cap project, taking a 10% stake — its first access to upstream gas in Abu Dhabi, Reuters reports. The project aims to feed domestic demand as well as Adnoc’s LNG export push. Adnoc will own 60% of the project, while BP and TotalEnergies will take 10% each. Other partners are Chinese and Korean state oil companies, state news agency Wam. The final investment decision isn’t expected until later this year, but BP signing up for Abu Dhabi gas while it sells assets elsewhere tells you where it rates the risk.
Plenty of that was already-loaded cargo getting out, and flows through Hormuz were ticking up toward 75% of pre-war levels, analysts think, so the bigger test will be how soon we see tankers sailing back into the Gulf to load new crude.
It’s touch-and-go right now after the IMO paused its escort of tankers and other ships through the strait Thursday after Singapore-flagged Ever Lovely was hit by a projectile off Oman — US officials say Iran fired on it. Also yesterday, the Revolutionary Guard turned at least two ships around.
Iran’s message is clear: We control the strait and we’ll put tolls in place if we want to. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who yesterday wrapped up three days of meetings with Gulf allies, faced pressure to ensure there is “free, unconditional, and unrestricted” passage with no tolls.
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%.
ALSO WORTH KNOWING TODAY-
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.
Oman is looking to add some 1.5 GW in solar capacity, and has launched tenders for two utility-scale solar farms towards this end, according to state-owned Nama Power and Water Procurement Company. The projects will be developed under the country’s independent power producer model, with private-sector developers invited to finance, build and operate the facilities.
It’s part of a broader push into renewables for Muscat, which recently launched Imtidad, a community-based solar program to boost adoption of community-scale solar power — think of it as something in between household-scale and utility-scale. The program aims to open access to renewables for companies and households that are unable to install roof solar modules due to architectural and financial constraints.
The common denominator here is Oman’s framework for electricity liberalization. Oman has been gradually transitioning to a liberalized electricity market, launching back in 2022 its single-buyer electricity spot market — which currently allows Oman’s Nama Power and Water Procurement Company to purchase energy through a daily short-term market open to producers who don’t have formal power-purchase agreements with the state.
Under cyberattack
At least four Iranian banks came under cyberattacks over the past week, amid a region-wide surge in cyberthreats that preceded the onset of US-Israeli attacks on Iran. The cyberattack affected card payments, online banking and cash dispensers at Bank Melli, Bank Saderat, Bank Tejarat and the Export Development Bank of Iran.
Mubadala-backed neobank Revolut is getting two very different receptions in the region. The UAE's central bank granted the British neobank full Stored Value Facilities and Retail Payment Services licenses on 17 June, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before a customer launch later this year. Morocco’s central bank, meanwhile, has shut the door — for now, with the governor Abdellatif Jouahri telling Revolut executives that their entry doesn’t fit with the country’s current priorities. Revolut has not filed a formal licensing application
ICYMI- Revolut is plans a full-scale UAE launch for late 2026, targeting the country's c. 10 mn expats and their cross-border payment flows.
But why is Morocco turning down Revolut? Jouahri cited three consuming regulatory files: negotiations with European partners over remittance flows, a year-end IMF/World Bank financial-stability assessment, and an AML/CFT evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force. Protectionism is probably the biggest factor: Attijariwafa recently launched a digital bank, which Jouhari said already covers the segment Revolut would target. So much for competition, yeah?
The split says something about where MENA fintech regulation is heading. The UAE is pulling in global fintechs as part of a deliberate push to deepen its digital-payments infrastructure, while Morocco is looking to give domestic incumbents the chance to digitize first. Revolut's executives told Jouahri they ‘understood’ and would revisit when conditions improve.
Iraq is mulling an Opec exit as it reviews its options to raise production to address an ensuing fiscal crisis. A senior Iraqi oil ministry official told Reuters this week that Baghdad will have to consider all available options if its production quota is not raised substantially, citing a financial crisis driven by the Iran war that has slashed oil exports via the Strait of Hormuz. A formal spokesperson denied Iraq is considering the move in remarks to Bloomberg, saying that the initial reports did not reflect the government’s position.
The parallel is hard to miss. The UAE left Opec on 1 May, citing a growing mismatch between its rising production capacity and its quotas. The GCC country had been producing close to 30% below its capacity of 4.9 mn bbl/d. Iraq — one of Opec’s five founding members, in whose capital the organization was established in 1960 — would be a far more destabilizing exit.
How serious is Iraq? This is likely more of a pressure play ahead of the next ministerial meeting at Opec, not a genuine departure plan. But with production down nearly two-thirds since February, the leverage Opec holds over a fiscally strained member is eroding fast.
REMEMBER- We reported in May that Iraq's new PM faces a fiscal crisis with no easy exit — with the treasury drawing down reserves and the prospect of missing public-sector payroll within months. S&P expects Iraqi real GDP to shrink by more than 15% in 2026.
DATA POINT- Dubai home prices fell for a third straight month in May, but the correction may be losing momentum. The ValuStrat Price Index shows citywide values down 1.2% m-o-m — better than April's 1.9% and a long way off a 5.9% drop in March, with annual growth still positive at 2.5%. Supply-constrained villas are holding (older freehold prices remain 191% above post-pandemic levels), while prime apartment stock bleeds, with Burj Khalifa off 13.9% and JBR down 9.9% year-on-year. Apartments overall posted their first annual decline in six years.
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