Malls and mobiles

ENAR

Arab markets made a well behaved transition into September. Benchmark indices at all regionally relevant exchanges moved as one might expect top local influencers want them to in the 36th week of the year. Saudi Arabia’s TASI went sideways just after some analysts started to warn of potentials for overheating. The Egyptian and Qatari benchmarks fielded new peaks, with their gains of 40 percent for the year to date shooting flares drawing attention. The two exchanges of the United Arab Emirates advanced nicely, with the Dubai market driven higher by almost 4 percent, courtesy of Emaar’s upcoming initial public offering of its malls unit and the linkage of ownership in Emaar Properties stock with priority allocation of shares in the IPO. This was confirmed by Emaar in a disclosure to the DFM dated September 2. According to Emaar, the priority allocation applies to 10 percent in the retail tranche of the