THIS MORNING: Subsea cables infrastructure projects are still stalled + Is Mubadala exiting its stake in Rio’s Metro?

Good morning, lovely people, and happy FRIDAY. It’s a quiet morning here at home, though not without more debt activity, as UAE issuers continue to rush to debt markets to lock in tight spreads after a muted window. Burjeel Holding has just priced its first USD 500 mn sukuk, and it was more than 3x oversubscribed.

Our Lede today takes a look at two-year old Magellan Capital — a firm that started as a family office sitting on USD 1.1 bn in Adnoc proceeds and has spent two years building a much bigger business with those funds.

The idea behind it was: if the products the banks were pitching weren't good enough for Magellan, they probably aren't good enough for a lot of family offices in this market. The UAE's largest locally-debuted hedge fund is the answer they built for themselves — and are now offering to others, alongside advisory on the thing it knows best: restructuring as a firm born out of this region.

Don’t expect subsea cable projects to resume soon…

The US-Iran ceasefire agreement has done a lot of things, but it won’t help work on delayed subsea cable infrastructure projects resume any faster, researchers tell the Financial Times. It might take months to survey and demine ocean floors, reassign cable-laying ships that were diverted during the conflict, and lift war-risk ins. clauses — all of which will need a sustained period of peace to happen, analysts say.

The projects at risk include some of the region’s most significant planned cables. The Gulf section of Meta’s 2Africa network — one of the world’s largest subsea cable projects — was reportedly halted in March, with force majeure notices issued for all Gulf operations. Also affected: the proposed USD 700 mn WorldLink network connecting Gulf states, Ooredoo's Fibre in the Gulf, and Sea-Me-We 6, which links Southeast Asia to Europe.

Why it matters for us: The UAE has invested heavily to position itself as the region’s AI and cloud computing hub — and that depends as much on connectivity as on capital, power, and chips. G42’s data center buildout and the hyperscaler partnerships the UAE has signed all assume reliable, high-capacity links to the rest of the world. The question now is not whether these projects will resume, but what the delay means for ongoing work — and whether the exposure of the region’s digital infrastructure as a vulnerability changes the calculus for future investment. We explored that question earlier this year. Read more here.

Cashing out?

Is Mubadala exiting its stake in the Rio de Janeiro Metro? That’s what Brazilian outlet NeoFeed is reporting, saying it has learned that the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund has hired Santander to explore a sale of its controlling stake in HMobi, the company that operates Rio de Janeiro’s MetroRio and MetroBarra concessions, potentially setting up one of the largest infrastructure transactions in Brazil’s mobility sector.

Mubadala Capital holds a 51.5% stake in HMobi, whose rail concessions run until 2048. The sale process is still at an early stage, and discussions with potential buyers are expected to continue for several months, NeoFeed added.

The planned exit would see Mubadala divest an asset it inherited rather than pursued. The fund took control of the firm in 2021 after converting BRL 2.6 bn in debt owed by infrastructure group Invepar — a restructuring that allowed Invepar to settle BRL 1.8 bn in outstanding obligations with creditors, Mubadala among them. Following the restructuring, the company was rebranded as HMobi, while the remaining 48.5% stake stayed with Brazilian pension funds Previ, Funcef, and Petros.

Abu Dhabi’s courts MSD for regional supply hub

Abu Dhabi is looking to bring more of the pharma supply chain onto its own turf. Global drugmaker MSD is looking into setting up a regional logistics hub in HELM, Abu Dhabi’s health and life sciences cluster, Wam reports. The cluster was launched last year to attract new drug manufacturing, R&D, and commercialized biotech to the emirate.

A closer look: The proposed facility would distribute a broad portfolio of MSD products to regional markets from Abu Dhabi and boost supply chain resilience in the sector. Earlier this year, the UAE also overhauled its pharma distribution rules to reduce inventory bottlenecks and supply disruptions.

More AED for Uzbekistan

UAE investors have committed up to USD 6 bn to new projects in Uzbekistan as Abu Dhabi deepens its push into Central Asia, Al Bayan reports. The announcement came during Investopia Tashkent, though no breakdown of the investors, projects, or deployment timeline was disclosed.

UAE ❤️ Uzbekistan: The two countries already have around 100 joint projects worth more than USD 20 bn across renewable energy, critical minerals, infrastructure, logistics, technology, and agriculture, with a target to grow the portfolio to USD 50 bn. Non-oil trade between both rose 52% y-o-y to USD 1.25 bn in 2025.

Background: Masdar alone invested more than USD 2 bn in Uzbekistan and built a 2 GW renewables portfolio. It is also developing a round-the-clock clean-energy project targeting up to 1 GW of baseload capacity, alongside a 300 MW solar plant and a 1 GW wind project in Navoiy.

PSA

The UAE is adding visa-on-arrival access for six more countries, provided they have residency permits from specific countries, state news agency Wam reports. Starting 25 July, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino, Kenyan, and South African passport holders, along with their accompanying family members, will be eligible for either a 14-day or 60-day visa on arrival, provided they hold a valid residence permit from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, or an EU member state.

Background: The UAE has been working to support tourism and business travel after the regional war hit the UAE’s tourism boom. Dubai and Ajman have already launched support measures to prop up their tourism industries, with a tourism-specific package also in the works for the UAE.

WEATHER- It’s getting slightly more bearable this weekend: The mercury hovers around 39-40°C throughout the weekend, with a low of 30-31°C in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

The big story abroad

Back to square one? The UN's International Maritime Organization, which had been running an evacuation operation to free hundreds of stranded vessels and some 11k seafarers, paused its operation after a cargo vessel was hit by a projectile near Oman. The attack happened following warnings from Iran that it would attack vessels taking routes that it had not approved.

This came after more than 70 ships had passed through the waterway since Wednesday, far below the 130-plus daily transits before the war but still considered progress after minimal movement over the past few months.

On the tech side of things this morning: Apple raised the prices of its iPads and MacBooks on the back of soaring memory chip costs as demand for chips rises due to the AI boom. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin ⁠raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac.”

A MacBook Air is now USD 200 pricier, and a MacBook Pro ‌with 1 terabyte of storage will set you back another USD 300.

For the Wall Street watchers: JPMorgan has promoted two executives, Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno, to co-presidents as CEO Jamie Dimon prepares to hand over the baton — the latest in a long succession saga. Dimon, however, is not leaving anytime soon: sources say he has at least three more years ahead of him as CEO, and he now has said he plans to stay on as executive chair for a time after he hands over the CEO role to his successor.

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