THIS MORNING: Adia, Lunate eye a hefty piece of Indian bourse’s USD 2.7 bn IPO + DP World plans truck fleet expansion amid Hormuz disruption

Good morning, everyone. Arabian Travel Market is back in Dubai this week, and the timing couldn’t be better: the city just posted its best month since February, with 869k international visitors arriving in August, and hotel occupancy climbing to 66% — up from just 36% in March. With ATM filling the halls of the Dubai World Trade Center through Thursday and airlines racing to rebuild the routes the war knocked out, tourism is the thread running through today's issue.

Etihad is a case in point. The Abu Dhabi carrier tells us on the sidelines of ATM that it’s now flying 15% more capacity than last year, with planes running about 90% full. Emirates has its own good news too — Germany has finally granted it a long-sought-after fifth Berlin landing slot, on top of winter bookings that are already ahead of last year’s pace.

Beyond travel, entertainment IP investment is having a moment in the UAE, and Abu Dhabi’s India bets keep multiplying. Two funds setting up shop in the UAE this year are betting on entertainment IPs — film scripts, music catalogs, and artist likenesses — as an investable asset, much like real estate before it. We spoke to both CineNow and IPNation about their two very different plays for the emerging asset class.

Space42’s ambitions keep growing too. Its JV with Viasat, named Equatys, is getting up to USD 1 bn in equity backing to build out its direct-to-device satellite venture. Elsewhere on the funding front, Adia and Lunate are weighing anchor allocations in the National Stock Exchange of India’s USD 2.7 bn IPO, and Tabby has reached a USD 6.5 bn valuation.

S&P affirmed Ras Al Khaimah’s sovereign credit rating with a stable outlook, despite trimming its GDP growth forecast.

The EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum is less than a month away — and here's some of what’s shaping up on the agenda:

• Where AI fits on the list of topics keeping CEOs awake at night
• What AI means for your company, your team, your job, and your family
• What's the AI opportunity for Egypt
• Building the AI infrastructure

And more panels to come.

Join us on 5 October in Cairo. Attendance is by invitation only, and seats are filling up quickly.

Request your invitation here.

Adia + Lunate eye hefty shares in Indian bourse’s USD 2.7 bn IPO

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia) and Lunate are considering sizable anchor allocations in India’s National Stock Exchange’s (NSE) much-awaited USD 2.7 bn IPO, Moneycontrol reports, citing unnamed sources. Discussions are ongoing, and allocations have not yet been finalized, but NSE is targeting a valuation as high as USD 46.3 bn, Reuters reports.

Who else is in the running: Domestic insurer LIC and Norway’s Norges Bank are expected to take the top two allocations after the anchor book opens tomorrow, 16 September. Adia and Lunate could be joined by French asset manager Carmignac, Singapore’s GIC, and Fidelity.

Retail investing powerhouse: NSE serves around 257 mn investor accounts and 130 mn unique investors, making it one of the world’s largest retail-focused exchanges. For the financial year ending in March, it reported net income of INR 103 bn (USD 1.1 bn).

IN CONTEXT- The NSE listing has long been awaited by investors after regulatory issues delayed its public-market debut. For Abu Dhabi, the prospect is about owning a slice of the infrastructure through which India’s capital increasingly flows, after backing for Manipal Health Enterprises’ listing, SBI Funds Management, and KRN Heat Exchangers’ institutional placement.

Emirates lands Berlin slot

Germany’s government said this week it has granted “a UAE airline” — which Bloomberg says is Emirates — a fifth landing slot in the country, effective immediately. It caps off decades of lobbying against opposition from Deutsche Lufthansa, which said the move “will shift economic value creation and jobs to the Gulf and further exacerbate the distortion of competition.”

The new flights are capped at seven a week, and Emirates won’t get so-called fifth-freedom rights that would let it use Berlin as a stopover en route to destinations like New York. Emirates currently flies to Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg. The timing lines up with a bigger UAE-Germany push: the UAE announced this week it plans to invest EUR 40 bn (USD 46.5 bn) in Europe's largest economy.

MEANWHILE- Winter demand is up — and then some — for Emirates, the carrier said in a press release. Bookings for destinations like South Africa, Egypt, India, KSA, and Pakistan are up y-o-y for flights from late October onward. Currently, the airline is operating at 93% of its pre-disruption capacity and, together with its partnership with flydubai, has a network of 214 cities.

Emirates carried over 8.6 mn passengers over July and August, and saw its arrivals to Dubai start to outpace last year’s figures in the second half of August — up 7% y-o-y.

Disruption to air travel from the Iran war hasn’t stopped it from expanding its network, launching routes to Benghazi, Aleppo, and Bangkok this year, with launches to Pokhara and Helsinki also in the works.

The trucks are here to stay

DP World plans to expand its regional truck fleet by about 40%, wagering that Gulf shipping disruption through Hormuz will outlast the war, Bloomberg reports, citing Stephen Whittingham, the company’s COO for freight forwarding in Europe. The ports giant wants to take its fleet to 1k trucks from 700 and is adding land routes linking Europe, the US, and Asia to the Persian Gulf.

The rationale: reopening the strait won’t erase the risk. “I think we’ll never get back to the original normal,” Whittingham said. Going overland costs three to four times as much as shipping by sea, but he sees that lingering uncertainty will keep demand for alternative routes like reliable direct trucking alive.

The road network is already carrying business: DP World launched a trucking service from western Europe to the Gulf via Turkey within days of Hormuz closing. It now handles up to 50 trucks a week, mainly carrying automotive parts and everyday consumer goods, alongside separate sea-and-road services for cargo from Asia and the US, also routed through Turkey.

The larger fleet targets ports built to avoid Hormuz altogether, including Fujairah in the UAE, Salalah in Oman, and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Next on the route map would be trucking European cargo to Iraq, then shipping it across the Gulf to the UAE. Talks with Baghdad over a permanent service are ongoing, Whittingham said.

The signal: Trucking had its moment in the crisis — and looks set to keep a bigger role after it. Back in March, we were tracking whether the Gulf could truck its way out — by May, emergency landbridges were operating at scale. The port operator had rerouted more than 350k TEUs overland by July, and this fleet expansion is doubling down on the workaround.

Dubai’s island dreams get a wartime reality check

The war is putting fresh strain on Dubai’s World Islands, with Kleindienst Group — developer of the USD 6 bn Heart of Europe project — reportedly laying off staff and facing lawsuits from investors and laid-off employees, according to the Financial Times, which cites people familiar with the matter and court documents. The off-grid development is also grappling with weaker international tourism and higher diesel costs.

Kleindienst rejects any suggestion the project isn't viable, with founder Josef Kleindienst saying occupancy climbed from 27% in March to 56% in May, and 80% is now the target in the coming weeks. The group still plans to open five hotels by 2027.

IN CONTEXT- The World Islands — Dubai’s man-made archipelago shaped like a map of the globe — had been seeing a renewed development push after years of delays, with new villas, hotels, and residential projects across the islands. The war has since exposed fresh cracks. We reported in April that Anantara World Islands had shut, while Heart of Europe had switched its focus toward staycations as international demand weakened.

The pressure is broader than one archipelago or even one developer. Sobha and Azizi have each cut hundreds of jobs since the war began, the FT reports, citing people familiar with the matter, while Dubai's overall housing market remains down 10% since fighting started, even with a pickup in sales in June. That tracks with what we've been seeing: a widening split in Dubai's housing market, with 2Q transactions down 19% q-o-q and new launches collapsing to 5.3k units from 45k in 1Q.

WATCH THIS SPACE- Regulators, meanwhile, have been informally warning larger developers they may need to absorb smaller, cash-strapped rivals as the war accelerates consolidation, according to people familiar with the matter.

Data point

91.3k — that’s how many new companies were established in the UAE in 1H 2026, Economy and Tourism Minister Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri told Al Bayan. The additions helped bring the number of active companies to nearly 1.2 mn by end-July, roughly double the c. 550k registered before the UAE opened up to 100% foreign ownership. Bin Touq says the government now expects to hit its 2 mn company target earlier than planned.

The rise comes after years of easing ownership and setup rules. We previously noted that changes to the Commercial Companies Law helped expand foreign ownership and were among the reforms cited for strengthening the UAE’s entrepreneurship environment.

The pipeline is broad: ADGM added 961 licenses in 1Q to reach 13.4k active licenses, while Sharjah issued 4.6k new licenses in 1H, up 5% y-o-y. DIFC has also surpassed 10k registered companies.

PSA

WEATHER- Temperatures today will hit 40°C in Dubai with an overnight low of 31°C, and 41°C in Abu Dhabi before cooling to an overnight low of 30°C, according to our favorite weather app.

Happening today

Al Sharaa to speak at Dubai media conference: The Arab Media Summit 2026 kicks off today at the Dubai World Trade Centre, featuring a keynote address by Syrian President Ahmed Al Sharaa. The three-day summit will feature over 175 sessions with international media executives, senior officials, and prominent journalists from 23 countries to discuss the future of global media.

The big story abroad

AI-linked stocks around the world dropped on Monday after industry leaders warned of potential dire consequences of rapid AI development. Wall Street’s tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 dropped to a six-week low driven by a chip stock selloff before paring losses to 0.4%, while the Dow shed 152 points. Nvidia slid 3.4% — weighed down by its sheer market size — despite soaring profits driven by AI chip demand.

More climate cuts: The Trump administration will cut Biden-era climate rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants by forcing coal- and gas-fired power sites to use technologies like carbon capture. The Environmental Protection Agency — which stands to save more than USD 300 bn through the measure — argued that global greenhouse gas harms are too remote and uncertain to tie to US power plants, placing them outside Clean Air Act authority.

East-West mineral race: The Pentagon will acquire a near-20% stake in Elmet Group through a USD 450 mn investment, expanding the Trump administration’s push to secure critical mineral supplies outside China. The move aims to boost domestic manufacturing of tungsten — a key metal used in military hardware — and expand long-term access to feedstock, sending Elmet's shares surging up to 55%.

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