ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates – At $157 for a round-trip ticket, Wizz Air’s three-hour flights between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv last April were less than half the cost of FlyDubai, El Al and other competitors.

Passengers, however, were crammed into some of the narrowest seats in the industry, flights were habitually late and extra charges piled up for luggage, food and legroom. In February, Wizz Air was rated the U.K.’s worst airline by a consumer organization in terms of boarding, cabin environment and seat comfort.

The Budapest-based carrier’s executives acknowledge the shortcomings and say they’re trying to improve on-time schedules and customer service. At the same time, they suggest that passengers know what they’re getting with the airline’s “ultra low-cost” model – similar to RyanAir, easyJet and Spirit Airlines – and business has never been better.

“I’m actually not too worried about how we are performing,” Johan Eidhagen, managing director of Wizz Air’s Abu Dhabi-based Mideast division, told The Circuit. “But I do understand that, of course, a lot of skepticism comes around being low-cost, of how you can achieve [better service]. And that’s the challenge.”

The airline, which was established as a Hungarian company in 2003, flies to 54 countries and operates 183 aircraft. Its lead investor is Indigo Partners, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based private equity firm that also owns controlling stakes in the U.S. carrier, Frontier Airlines, and Chile’s JetSmart. 

Over the last few years, Wizz has increased flights to the Gulf, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The airline said in March that it plans to increase its fleet to 200 aircraft this year and 500 by 2030. The Mideast subsidiary, Wizz Air Abu Dhabi, is a joint venture between Wizz Air Holdings and ADQ, a government-owned Abu Dhabi investment company, which owns 51% of the airline. Eidhagen is a Swedish native who joined Wizz Air as a marketing executive in 2015 and previously worked for Nokia.

In July, the U.K’s Civil Aviation Authority said it had received hundreds of complaints about Wizz Air’s failure to reimburse passengers after flight cancellations and delays. It said the airline committed to complying with reimbursement regulations.

Alannah Travers, a communications specialist in the U.K., said she still hasn’t been reimbursed for a  flight she booked and then canceled to the Canary Islands in 2019. Getting any response from the airline’s telephone switchboard required more than an hour on hold. “Technically, I’ve never flown with them, but [the airline has] terrible customer service,” Travers said. Nadine Knotzer, an art gallery owner in Dubai, said high fees for luggage and seat selection on a London to Vienna flight made Wizz Air’s prices more expensive than she expected from a budget airline. “There is nothing cheap about this,” she said.

On the other hand, Salwa Azzam, a magazine editor in Dubai, said she found flying with Wizz Air delightful. “The team on board was incredibly friendly and attentive,” she said. “What surprised me the most was how affordable the tickets were without compromising on the quality of the flight.”

Eidhagen said Wizz Air’s priorities are passenger safety, low prices and on-time performance. “If we can deliver those three most important things,” he said, “then I think we have a strong and good airline.”

TEL AVIV, Israel – SolarEdge Technologies, one of Israel’s largest companies trading on the Nasdaq, is forming a joint renewable energy venture with a business group in Saudi Arabia amid White House efforts to broker a normalization pact between the two countries.

The new company created by SolarEdge and Ajlan & Bros Holding will be based in the Saudi capital of Riyadh and work to accelerate the adoption of solar power in the kingdom, the two partners said in a July 31 statement. SolarEdge, an S&P 500 company that maintains headquarters in both Herzliya, Israel, and Milpitas, Calif., produces solar inverters, which manage photovoltaic cells to make renewable energy more efficient. Ajlan is the majority shareholder.

The announcement came more than a year after the Saudi and Israeli companies signed a cooperation agreement that provided little detail of what the alliance would entail. It was one of 13 deals between Saudi and U.S. companies that were announced while U.S. President Joseph Biden visited Saudi Arabia in July 2022.

Zvi Lando, SolarEdge’s Israeli CEO, said in the statement that his company was “honored to partner with Ajlan & Bros. Holding and to support Saudi Arabia’s journey towards Vision 2030” – referring to a document outlining the kingdom’s efforts to wean the economy off oil and develop industries ranging from finance and tourism to sports and entertainment.

“SolarEdge is committed to driving the clean energy transition on a global scale, exemplified by this JV which will provide local enterprises in Saudi Arabia with the support they need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels to clean solar energy and meet their aggressive renewable energy goals,” Lando said. The statement was released from the company’s California office and did not refer to its Israeli roots.

Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have diplomatic relations and their citizens are generally barred from each other’s territory unless they have second passports issued by other countries. The conditions are similar to those in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain before the two Gulf states signed the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, establishing formal ties with Israel. Several Israeli companies have managed to operate in Saudi Arabia through subsidiaries registered in other countries.

Biden, who has repeatedly said he would like to facilitate an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would normalize relations between the two countries, sent senior aides to Riyadh last month to discuss a possible deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said a Saudi normalization agreement is one of his greatest diplomatic priorities. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s prime minister, has said he would like to establish closer relations, but Israel would have to make significant gestures to the Palestinians before an agreement is reached.

SolarEdge is one of the largest of the close to 90 Israeli companies that trade on Wall Street. Its shares have fallen 38% this year and were last trading at $176.35, giving the company a market value of about $10 billion.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Over the past 16 years, Gil Horsky has been developing global strategies for selling Oreo cookies and Pepsi-Cola.

Now he’s using his experience at Mondelez International and PepsiCo, two of the world’s largest snack-food manufacturers, to build a venture capital fund focused on healthy eating, desert farming and sustainable methods for feeding the earth’s population.

Horsky, 47, and his partner, Esther Barak-Landes, announced last week that they raised $50 million for their new Tel Aviv-based fund, Flora Ventures, and expect to attract another $30 million.

The fund will invest in so-called agrifood companies, Horsky said, with backing from the Harel Group, Israel’s fourth-largest insurer; Haifa Group, a maker of fertilizers and plant nutrition products; and Sadot Kibbutzim, a cooperative marketing organization representing 185 kibbutz farms. Flora is also in discussions with possible investors from Arab countries in the Gulf, he said.

“We specifically invest in companies that are in the agrifood value chain, always touching one of two parallel universes, either human health or planetary health,” Horsky told The Circuit.

“On the human health side, we’re looking at companies in areas such as sugar reduction, functional ingredients and food as medicine,” he said. “On the planetary health side, we’re interested in… sustainable packaging. regenerative agriculture…. and the whole movement of food security – how do we grow more with less and how are we more efficient with our water usage.”

Flora plans to invest $1 million to $4 million in promising startups, Horsky said. The fund recently made its first investment in Arrakis Bio, which is developing technology for the animal-free production of collagen – the primary component of skin, muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments – and gelatin, the basis for many food products.

After working as a marketing executive for the biscuit and chocolate divisions at Chicago-based Mondelez, the $100 billion snack food giant that owns Nabisco and Cadbury, Horsky was named senior director of the company’s venture arm, SnackFutures. It was there that he made an investment for Mondelez in Israel’s Torr FoodTech and focused on agricultural innovation.

Barak-Landes, an Israeli lawyer and veteran VC investor, was co-founder of Nielsen Innovate, the business incubator and investment arm of the New York company known for its media audience surveys.

“The downturn in the economy actually makes it a very good time to invest,” Horsky said. “The valuations are good so that you can really build great companies and we’ve seen in history that when there are tough economic conditions, that’s actually when you have the best vintages of startups pumping up the best performance for VCs.”

Horsky said Israel’s expertise in desert agriculture has attracted attention from investors in the Gulf, where the arid climate has made food security and farming technology a government priority, and led to a series of meetings on the possibility of investing with Flora.

TEL AVIV, Israel – An investment group led by Abu Dhabi’s government-owned ADQ fund called off a proposed deal to buy control of Phoenix Holdings, Israel’s biggest insurer, citing regulatory issues.

In a report to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange early Sunday, Phoenix said the draft agreement it filed with the ADQ consortium in December was terminated. The deal was one of the largest between companies in the United Arab Emirates and Israel since the two countries normalized relations almost three years ago under the U.S.-backed Abraham Accords.

“The parties have come to a mutual understanding regarding termination of the term sheet… in light of the potential regulatory limitations that would have arisen from the acquisition of the controlling stake by the consortium resulting in potential restrictions for several members of the consortium to undertake additional material investments in Israel,” the Phoenix statement said.

ADQ, the third-largest Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund with close to $160 billion in assets under management, offered as much as $675 million for a stake of 25-30% in Phoenix in negotiations with the Israeli company’s controlling U.S. shareholders, Centerbridge Partners and Gallatin Point Capital.

The UAE and Israel signed a free-trade agreement last year that the two countries predict will generate $10 billion in annual bilateral economic activity by 2026. Mubadala, another Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, bought a 22% stake in an offshore Israeli natural gas field two years ago for $1.1 billion.

Abu Dhabi’s G42, a government-owned defense and technology company, launched joint firm last month with Viola Ventures, Israel’s largest private investor in tech firms, aiming to provide computer engineers and other skilled employees to businesses around the world.

While the Abraham Accords, which also included Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, generated excitement for a new era of Middle East trade – bringing some half a million Israelis to visit the UAE for tourism and exploration of business opportunities – some of the enthusiasm has cooled.

UAE officials have said they are committed for the long term to normalization with Israel, even as the government has publicly criticized Israel’s handling of clashes with the Palestinians. Most recently, the UAE condemned the entry of Israeli forces into Jenin last month, the biggest West Bank military operation in 20 years, in which 12 Palestinians and an Israeli were killed.

With less than five months until the COP28 environmental summit opens in Dubai, the event’s Emirati leader, Sultan Al Jaber, pledged to confront the world’s slow response to global warming.

Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, Al Jaber, president-designate of the United Nations climate change conference that will be hosted by the UAE, said more pressure will be applied on governments to accelerate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. He also laid out the schedule for the two-week event that opens Nov. 30 and will include the participation of some 200 countries.

“We must be brutally honest about the gaps that need to be filled, the root causes and how we got to this place here today,” Jaber told climate ministers and senior officials from the European Union, the U.S., China and other G20 countries. “Then we must apply a far-reaching, forward-looking, action-oriented and comprehensive response to address these gaps practically.”

Jaber, who is also head of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and UAE minister of industry and advanced technology, said delegates at the conference will engage in a “global stocktake” that will indicate how far their countries lag behind goals for reduced fossil fuel use and making the transition to renewable energy production.

The stocktake exercise addresses the recognition that the current pace of replacing carbon-based fuels is insufficient to meet the target set in the U.N.’s 2015 Paris Agreement that would try to limit global warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) from preindustrial levels.

“Today I am calling on all of us to disrupt business as usual, unite around decisive action and achieve game-changing results,” he said. “We need to challenge old models that were built for the last century. We need to break down silos that are slowing progress. And we need to bridge divides that are blocking critical breakthroughs.”

Some members of Congress and European legislators have attacked the choice of Al Jaber to preside over COP28 given his company’s prominence in the fossil fuel industry. The appointment was defended by John Kerry, the White House special envoy for climate, who said Al Jaber’s connection to the industry and his role in the UAE government will make the conference more effective. Al Jaber said in Brussels that he will arrange meetings between heads of the major oil companies, government leaders, the U.N. and international energy agencies. 

Al Jaber, who serves as chairman of Masdar, the UAE’s alternative fuel company,  called for a tripling of the world’s renewable energy capacity by 2030 and a doubling of energy efficiency. He said all governments are being encouraged to update their emissions-cutting targets by September. The UAE’s climate ministry last month said it planned a 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, raising its previous goal of 31%.

In response to growing complaints about the costs of energy transition, Al Jaber called on international financial institutions to provide more funds to help poorer countries address climate change.

He said the conference would be built around four pillars: “Fast-tracking the energy transition, fixing climate finance, focusing on lives and livelihoods, and making COP28 fully inclusive.”

Nearly three years after establishing diplomatic ties, representatives from a group of Arab countries and Israel met this week in Bahrain to brainstorm ideas about forming a regional free-trade alliance.

The discussions were unofficial and meant to lay the groundwork for future negotiations among the countries that normalized relations with Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords. The talks were organized by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, as part of the backchannel “N7 Initiative” it developed in partnership with the New York-based Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation to bolster the Accords.

“We brought senior trade negotiators together for a private discussion… to do a road map for a multilateral, regional free-trade agreement,” William F. Wechsler, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and head of the N7 project, told The Circuit.

Taking part in the talks on Monday and Tuesday were trade officials from Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Israel, Wechsler said, as well as former officials from Egypt and Sudan. Jordan did not participate. The N7 brand refers to Israel and the six Arab countries that have signed peace treaties or normalization pacts with it. Under the rules of the conference, none of the trade negotiators’ names could be made public.

The back-channel talks provided an opportunity for government representatives to discuss concrete steps for advancing normalization face-to-face at a time when such encounters have become less frequent. A meeting of the U.S.-backed Negev Forum, comprising the foreign ministers of the seven countries, has been repeatedly postponed this year amid violent eruptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have been strongly condemned by the Arab countries in the N7.

The trade conference was the third in a series of N7 events aimed at generating ideas for specific areas of Arab-Israel cooperation that will be presented for consideration by the Negev Forum. It followed a March meeting in the UAE on agriculture, water and food security, and December talks in Morocco on education and coexistence.

Increasing the potential impact of the N7 project is the fact that it was directed until last month by Daniel Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Shapiro was appointed on June 29 to be the State Department’s senior advisor on regional integration. In his announcement, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said Shapiro’s task was to help “deepen and broaden the Abraham Accords, and build the Negev Forum.”

The UAE and Israel signed a free-trade agreement last year that the two countries predict will generate $10 billion in annual bilateral economic activity by 2026. Bahrain has indicated it is also close to signing a free-trade agreement with Israel. Wechsler said that a regional agreement would bring extra benefits because “as you add countries, it has a multiplier effect on free trade.”

While the trade negotiators went unidentified at the conference, the participating nations sent senior officials to observe the discussions and join an opening dinner at the Sofitel Hotel in Bahrain’s capital city of Manama. Among them were Abdelouahed Rahal, director general of the trade division at Morocco’s Ministry of Industry and Trade; Shaikh Abdulla bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, undersecretary for political affairs at Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry; Israel’s ambassador to Bahrain, Eitan Naeh; and the U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, Steven Bondy.

In a bid to strengthen normalization efforts across the Middle East and North Africa, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Israel are promoting business ties among women.

The most recent joint activity was a three-day conference in May that took place in Marrakesh, Morocco, and drew nearly 100 female business leaders. Besides networking, the gathering explored women’s access to education, financial security and opportunities for leadership. In a series of panel discussions and workshops, the conference focused on investments, corporate funding and infrastructure development. Participants also discussed shared challenges for women in the Middle East and Africa and the impact of geography, culture and religion.

The conference was organized by Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit organization  that promotes Israeli tech companies, and Morocco’s Consensus Public Relations firm. 

Among the participants were women from Bahrain, Benin, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and the U.S., organizers said.

“What we were hearing often is that these women, particularly in the countries that we targeted, are often alone around decision-making tables,” Aviva Steinberger, SNC’s director of innovation diplomacy, told The Circuit. “The goals of this event were to connect these women at a professional level and at a personal level.”

The conference, which was titled “Women Connect to Innovate,” was supported by a range of companies and organizations including Google, Women in Tech, Morocco’s Foundation for Research, Development and Innovation in Science and Engineering and the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.

Among the participants from Israel was Justine Zwerling, who heads the Middle East branch of Shore Capital Markets and was a founding member of the Gulf-Israel Women’s Forum. Morocco’s minister of solidarity and social integration, Aawatif Hayar, hosted a dinner for the conference. While the workshops were going on, three artists from Morocco, Israel and Senegal created a graffiti wall dedicated to women’s solidarity and international cooperation.

The event followed up on a larger conference organized last year by SNC that focused on developing ties between Moroccan and Israeli technology startups, particularly those addressing health, agriculture and climate technologies.

During the 2022 conference, companies and organizations from the two countries signed 13 memorandums of understanding: Israel’s Watergen, whose technology extracts water from air, signed a distribution deal with Morocco’s Waman Solutions; Israel’s Mehadrin formed a partnership with Adolam under the name “Global Farming Morocco” to grow and export avocados; and Israel’s Alma Lasers signed with Casablanca-based Guess Clinic to bring Alma’s aesthetic surgery devices to the Moroccan market.

Israel and Morocco maintained low-key business and diplomatic ties for years until agreeing to normalize relations under the Abraham Accords in December 2020. Many Israelis come from Moroccan descent and are estimated to number close to 1 million. André Azoulay, a prominent Jewish businessman in Morocco and senior adviser to King Mohammed VI, presented SNC with an award for its contributions to technological cooperation between the two countries.

AllianceBernstein, one of the largest U.S. asset managers, plans to open a regional office in the United Arab Emirates to tap into the rising tide of investments flowing through the Gulf.

The Nashville, Tenn.-based firm, which has $676 billion in assets under management, said last week that it received a regulatory license to operate in the Dubai International Financial Centre, a special economic zone within the UAE’s largest city. More than 300 asset- and wealth-management firms have offices in the DIFC.

The new office will be led by Jean-Paul Hobeika, managing director for Middle East institutions, who was named senior executive officer, AllianceBernstein said. He will work with Eduard van Nes, head of intermediary sales for the Middle East and Africa, who recently moved to Dubai. The firm, which employs 3,000 people at 45 offices around the world, has an Israeli branch in Tel Aviv.

Setting up in the UAE will spur AllianceBernstein’s regional growth and “improve our ability to serve clients through proximity as well as capturing important market opportunities,” said Willem van Gijzen, head of Central Europe, Middle East and Africa institutions at the firm. The new office will target institutional clients, distribution partners and family offices with its asset management services, the firm said.

A proliferation of mergers and acquisitions across the Gulf, as well as the inflow of money from Russians relocating because of international sanctions have bolstered financial and property markets in the UAE. The country’s sovereign wealth funds now manage more than $1.5 trillion in assets.

Capital inflow to the UAE rose by 10% last year to $23 billion, according to government records. Investment banks and asset management firms have also been opening new offices in Saudi Arabia, which has made establishing local branches a prerequisite for government business. The World Bank raised its growth forecast for the UAE to 3.4% from 1.1%, based on higher oil output, recent economic reforms and new investments.

Arif Amiri, CEO of the DIFC Authority, said AllianceBernstein’s “commitment to the region is testament to Dubai’s strategic position at the center of the world, providing the firm with access to $8 trillion of private wealth across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.” The DIFC said in February that some 50 international hedge funds have applied for licenses to open in its independently regulated district.