Following the historic decision by GCC member states to adopt value added tax (VAT) on January 1st 2018, regional businesses are scrambling to determine exactly what the tax will mean for them. For regional CFOs, the introduction of VAT within the GCC marks the beginning of a new era in financial reporting, and therefore a…
Talent acquisition and talent management are the twin cornerstones of a successful business, often trumping all other resources in terms of their ability to influence profits and organisational longevity. For CFOs, the ability to nurture talent is key to building a pipeline to the C-suite – an important feature of succession planning. A CFO is…
Europe will need between 670 and 780 billion USD worth of investments into its digital infrastructure if it hopes to keep pace with the United States and China. The region needs to develop fibre-optic networks and high-speed 5G wireless applications and networks in order to stay competitive in the global tech arena. According to Guenther…
Chinese investors are becoming increasingly interested in Europe, reports show. In the UK alone, Chinese investment into business and infrastructure has increased by nearly 500 percent over the past six years – from 666 million GBP in 2010 to 3.8 billion GBP in 2016. According to former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, as many…
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…
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…
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…