The Middle East is a region known for its high liquidity and its concentration of high-net worth individuals – and not for its tech sector. This is mainly due to the fact that the regional tech sector is underdeveloped. Entrepreneurship is hindered by complicated regulations and restrictions, bureaucracy, geopolitical and economic instability, and the lack…
The GCC, or Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman) has many advantages as a tech market. Its benefits include its comparatively high proportion of youth, and its strategic location – Dubai, which is emerging as the regional tech hub, is within a four-hour flight radius of one-third…
Middle Eastern real estate investors are partnering with US developers to make significant investments into US property. The Kuwait Real Estate Company (Aqarat) has partnered with New York’s Synapse Development Group to invest a total of 25 million USD in various US properties in the future. Aqarat and Synapse will also be leveraging their capital…
Outbound capital flows from the Middle East reached 10 billion USD in the first half of 2016, according to CBRE’s Middle East “In and Out” 2016 report. Much of this capital was deployed in US property markets. Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) invested in major strategic assets in Atlanta, while Houston attracted investment from…
Chinese investors have been spending billions on foreign technology opportunities. By July 2016, Chinese entities had made investments into Silicon Valley worth over 6 billion USD (excluding real estate investments). More than half of this figure was invested over the past 18 months alone. Investors have been driven largely by growing wealth in China and…
As China continues to undergo a focused shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one that relies heavily on service sectors and technology, Chinese investors are sourcing innovative technology through investments into tech companies abroad. Media.net, an advertising technology startup based in Dubai and New York, has been acquired for around 900 million USD in cash…
Actis, an investment firm specializing in growth markets, recently made a significant investment in Medis Group, a branded generic pharmaceuticals business based in North Africa. Medis was the first pharmaceutical company to launch sterile products in North Africa, and is responsible for building one of the first oncology laboratories on the continent. The company plans…
Fintech has become a familiar entry in the banking lexicon. Gone are the days when “finance technology” was a brand new concept, spoken of only in the pages of niche publications. Fintech is now a full-fledged phenomenon, a darling of both the tech world and the finance industry alike. In 2015, fintech received 14.5 billion…
The rapid devaluation of the Chinese yuan triggered a massive capital outflow of between 700 billion and 1 trillion USD in 2015. And a great deal of this investment capital is going into overseas real estate. In the first half of 2016 alone, Chinese entities invested 16.1 billion USD into overseas real estate. Half of…
Chinese individuals and institutions have spent over 16.1 billion USD on overseas real estate in the first half of 2016, representing a massive increase over H1 2015, when they invested less than 8 billion USD. Chinese insurance companies were responsible for half of all Chinese investment in foreign property this year, with conglomerates and property…