Foie gras and French goat cheese fueled Gourmet Egypt’s stunning debut on the Cairo stock exchange today, in which the upscale grocer’s shares rose as much as 38%.

With sales split between institutional and retail investors at 6.90 Egyptian pounds per share, the store’s IPO raised almost $28 million, Bloomberg reports.

Gourmet Egypt, which opened its business 20 years ago and specializes in imported foods such as Angus beef and Roquefort cheese, recently introduced ready-to-heat meals under its own “Handcrafted by Gourmet” label.

The Egyptian Exchange’s benchmark index has soared 68% over the past 12 months and officials are expecting as many as eight new listings this year.

Saudi Arabia is getting ready to unveil an updated blueprint for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 overhaul of the kingdom’s finances.

Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan said on Sunday that discussions on the government’s new five-year plan are underway at this week’s economic conference in AlUla that takes into account Saudi Arabia’s declining oil revenues and resulting budget shortfalls.

“We continue really to reprioritize, rework our policies, making sure that we enhance as we go to ensure that we enable the private sector to lead the economy,” Al-Jadaan told Bloomberg.

The government is recalibrating some of its most ambitious projects, including suspending construction of the giant cube-shaped Mukaab in Riyadh’s $50 billion New Murabba development and scaling back the $1 trillion Neom development’s futuristic city called The Line.

Saudi officials have also postponed the 2029 Asian Winter Games at Neom’s Trojena resort and reduced the original scope of Neom’s sprawling development to focus on what are projected to be the most promising sectors, such as tourism, logistics and technology.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, meanwhile, will be testing the appetite of foreign investors to put their money in the kingdom, including in the sovereign wealth fund’s 120 portfolio companies, at this week’s PIF Private Sector Forum, Arabian Gulf Business Insight reports.

Egypt has rolled out a National Startup Charter, unveiling a $1 billion plan to turn young companies into engines of jobs and growth.

The five-year program is designed to back about 5,000 startups and create half a million jobs as officials try to make entrepreneurship a mainstream career path, Arab News reports.

Egyptian startups have been gaining traction, pulling in $238 million in venture capital over the past year.

The charter promises simpler regulations, faster government approvals and better access to financing, addressing long-standing complaints about Egypt’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and red tape.

Kazakhstan will host the 2029 Asian Winter Games, an event originally planned for Saudi Arabia until the kingdom acknowledged last month that its $38 billion Trojena ski resort would not be ready in time.

The Olympic Council of Asia named Almaty, Kazakhstan, as the replacement host city after deliberations on the sidelines of the 2026 Winter Olympics, which begin today in Milan.

Riyadh and the Council agreed in late January to postpone Saudi Arabia’s staging of the Games, which had been awarded to Trojena as part of the NEOM megaproject in 2022. Kazakhstan last hosted the Asian Winter Games in 2011. 

Saudi Arabia’s 80-year-old flagship carrier is preparing to make its largest jet order yet, as it refocuses on religious pilgrimages in the kingdom’s renewed push to become a travel and tourism hub.

Executives from Saudia are studying models from Airbus and Boeing for an order of at least 150 narrowbody and widebody jets, which are expected to replace some of its 200-strong fleet, while also boosting its total stock, Bloomberg reports.

It comes as startup Riyadh Air is preparing to launch full commercial services in coming weeks, with the goal of becoming an upmarket tourist and business carrier. Saudia will reposition itself to take advantage of the growth in religious tourists flocking to Mecca and Medina.

Meanwhile, Dubai’s Emirates airline has lost more than $10 billion in freight and passenger revenues because of ongoing delays in deliveries from Boeing and Airbus, Sir Tim Clark, its President, told Arabian Gulf Business Insights.

Emirates’ order backlog has now reached 315 planes from Boeing and 57 from Airbus, with 18 A350s due before the end of this year. Clark said about 120 of the Boeing planes should have been delivered by now.

Chevron signed a preliminary agreement with Syria’s state-owned oil company and Qatar’s UCC Holding to study prospects for finding offshore oil and gas as the country tries to rebuild its economy from 14 years of civil war.

At a signing ceremony in Damascus on Wednesday, Syrian Petroleum Co. CEO Youssef Kabalawi described the venture as “the most important” offshore energy exploration deal in Syria’s history.

For Syria, the agreement offers a possible route toward developing offshore resources for the first time as the fledgling government of President Ahmed al-Shaara seeks to revive energy production and attract foreign investment.

The deal builds on Chevron’s expanding eastern Mediterranean portfolio, which includes a recently approved expansion of Israel’s Leviathan gas field, which is set to supply Egypt and others with more than $35 billion worth of natural gas.

Separately, TotalEnergies is leading a consortium with Eni and QatarEnergy that received a new permit to explore offshore Lebanon. The French company began looking for natural gas off the Lebanese coast in late 2022, but results so far have been disappointing.

Every camel in Saudi Arabia will soon be issued its own “passport.”

The ID documents will include each camel’s name, date and place of birth, breed, gender, coloring, place of issuance and microchip number, as well as photographs of the animal to ensure ease of identification, the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture said in a directive circulated on Tuesday.

The initiative is aimed at organizing the camel sector to improve market efficiency and confidence.

It is also expected to increase the market value of Saudi Arabia’s camels at local and international auctions. 

Dubai unveiled the first four stations of its planned underground Dubai Loop, including stops at the Burj Khalifa skyscraper and the Dubai International Financial Centre, as part of a $545 million effort to ease downtown congestion.

The full network – built with Elon Musk’s Boring Company – is expected to stretch about 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) with 19 stations, and is designed to cut travel time on the initial route from about 20 minutes to three minutes.

In a separate above-ground project called the Glydways system, Dubai plans to launch small autonomous electric vehicles running on narrow dedicated lanes and linked to the Metro that can move more than 10,000 passengers per hour in each direction.