Dubai is taking advantage of the quieter summer time to experiment with a four-day work week and shorter office hours in an effort to promote better work-life balance.

“Our Summer is Flexible,” a pilot scheme at 15 Dubai government organizations, will see work suspended on Fridays and working days reduced to seven hours between Aug.12 – Sept. 30.

HR departments will gather feedback on the program and make recommendations on whether it should continue.

Dubai is not the first emirate to try out the idea, which is gaining popularity around the world.

Sharjah introduced a four-day work week in 2022 in order to maintain Friday, a holy day in Islam, as a full day off after the UAE government switched to a western weekend with a half-day on Fridays.

In a nod to Washington, Qatar has agreed to buy a $180 million stake in TechMet, an Irish mining investment firm backed by the U.S. International Development Finance Corp.

The move, carried out through the Qatar Investment Authority, is designed to loosen China’s dominance of minerals critical to generating sustainable energy and is the first such collaboration between a western and Gulf state, the Financial Times reports. 

The Biden administration has been trying to overtake China in the market for lithium, cobalt and other minerals used to power electric cars, making the objective a priority in its campaign to switch to renewable power, according to the newspaper.

Part of those efforts has been to persuade Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to invest in U.S. initiatives to extract and process critical minerals for industrial use, the FT said. It notes the Gulf states all seek to become players in the critical minerals market, using their neutrality in the U.S.-China standoff to their advantage.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has pumped another $1.5 billion into electric vehicle start-up Lucid Motors ahead of the launch of its first SUV later this year.

The PIF, which already has a 60% stake in California-based Lucid after investing about $8 billion over several years, will buy $750 million in convertible preferred stock and provide a $750 million loan facility through Ayar, an affiliate investment company.

Nasdaq-traded Lucid reported Q2 earnings yesterday, recording a $790 million net loss, but beating analyst expectations with $200 million revenue after delivering 2,394 cars in the quarter.

The EV maker expects to produce 9,000 cars for 2024, with the launch later this year of the Gravity SUV, priced at around $80,000, which is likely to diversify its potential customer base. 

Saudi Arabia has been scouring the globe for potential supplies of lithium, a critical mineral used in battery production, as it attempts to become a major regional EV manufacturer, with Lucid opening a factory in the kingdom last year. 

Bandar Alkhorayaf, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Industry and Mineral Resources, toured Brazil and Chile over the past two weeks looking for mining investment opportunities.

As a result, the kingdom is eyeing a collaboration with Chilean state-owned miner Codelco to develop lithium deposits.

International Holding Co., the broad-based conglomerate controlled by UAE power broker Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, is expanding its financial services business by forming Rorix Holdings.

The new company under the IHC umbrella will focus on finance, commodities trading and trade insurance, the parent company said in a statement on Monday.

Through Rorix, IHC said it expects to accelerate trade volumes, attract foreign investment, and broaden economic partnerships.

Rorix will “play a crucial role in realizing the UAE’s vision in facilitating seamless trade across borders,” IHC Chief Executive Syed Basar Shueb said.

The new firm will seek to capitalize on a flurry of free trade agreements the UAE has signed in the past three years with countries including India, Indonesia, Israel, Turkey and South Korea, he said.

Asia’s second richest man Gautam Adani has laid out his succession plans for the first time.

In a rare interview, the 62-year-old tycoon says he will retire at 70 and hand over the reins of his vast Adani Group conglomerate to his two sons, Karan and Jeet, and their cousins, Pranav and Sagar, Bloomberg reports.

Adani is the 11th richest individual in the world, with a net worth of more than $100 billion, and has deep business connections in the Gulf from ports and power to tech and AI.

Planning for one of the world’s largest and most complex transfers of wealth kicked off in 2018 when Adani invited the four heirs to lunch at his home and gave them a three-month ultimatum to decide whether they would keep the Adani Group together or split it up and part ways, Bloomberg reported.

The four men decided to stick together. “I am happy that all of them are hungry for growth, which is not common in the second generation,” Adani said. “They have to work together to build a legacy.”

Saudi Arabia is cautiously bullish on Asia’s appetite for oil while it tries to stoke demand in Europe.

That’s the takeaway from state-owned Aramco’s decision to raise the price of its Arab Light crude to Asia for the first time in three months – an increase of 20 cents to $2 a barrel above the regional Oman-Dubai benchmark, Bloomberg reports. At the same time, the world’s biggest oil company slashed prices in Europe by $2.75, its biggest reduction since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The moves come days after OPEC+ signaled it would make no changes to oil supplies this month and maintained its tentative plans to let member-countries start increasing production next quarter.

In contrast to its rivals whose stock prices are hitting record highs this year, Aramco is down 17%, the worst performance among the world’s 10 biggest oil companies by revenue, a reflection of its production cuts. PetroChina, by contrast, is up 24% while Exxon Mobil has gained 17% and Shell has risen 4.6% since the beginning of 2024.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is putting its $925 billion in assets to work in China.

Following a trip to Beijing last month by a delegation of Saudi executives led by PIF Governor Yasir Al Rumayyan, the sovereign wealth fund corralled preliminary agreements worth $50 billion with six major Chinese financial institutions.

Besides a series of deals focused on renewable energy and steel manufacturing that were already disclosed, the PIF said in a statement on Thursday that it signed the memorandums of understanding with the Agricultural Bank of China, the Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, China Export and Credit Insurance Corp., the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

The new agreements “demonstrate the PIF’s strong and deepening relationships with leading financial institutions and accentuate PIF’s commitment to enhancing partnerships globally,” Fahad Al Saif, the fund’s Head of Global Capital Finance, said in the statement.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Gulf states have been engaged in a delicate balancing act of strengthening commercial ties with China, the world’s second-biggest economy, while steering clear of U.S. efforts to restrict Chinese access to cutting-edge technology in artificial intelligence and other competitive fields.

Two of Kuwait’s biggest banks are exploring a merger that would create an Islamic lender with more than $50 billion in assets.

The proposed tie-up comes amid a wave of banking consolidation across the Middle East, partly driven by competition for financing large-scale projects as Gulf countries rapidly diversify away from oil. 

Boubyan Bank, with assets worth $29 billion and Gulf Bank, with assets worth $24 billion, will conduct due diligence and valuation studies into the potential deal, the two lenders said in a statement.

The move comes as Kuwait Finance House weighs taking a large stake in Saudi Investment Bank, while National Bank of Bahrain considers a potential merger with Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait.

Consolidation of financial institutions in the GCC is being driven by the need to create lenders with greater scale as countries seek financing for mega-projects and other diversification activities aimed at boosting the non-oil economy.

These capital intensive activities, and the development and diversification of funding channels are expected to drive the GCC’s debt capital market to reach $1 trillion outstanding by next year, according to a new report from Fitch. 

Saudi Arabia, which is contending with lower oil profits and mounting expenses associated with its Vision 2030 transformation plans, held a 43% share of the $940 billion outstanding government debt in the GCC at the end of Q1 2024, while the UAE held 30%.

Around 40% of outstanding government debt was sukuk – bonds compliant with Islamic sharia law – while the rest was in conventional bonds, Fitch said.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sukuk, meanwhile, reached $18 billion outstanding in GCC countries, driven by increasing sustainability commitments, according to Fitch.