UAE / MENA Daily Briefing

Dubai awarded an Indian-Japanese consortium — L&T (Larsen and Toubro) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — the design-and-build contract for an automated passenger transport system at the first phase of the new Al Maktoum International Airport, AGBI reported. The $35bn total airport program is set to be the world's largest airport by passenger capacity when complete, directly supporting Dubai's position as the primary global aviation hub between East and West. For ADX and DFM investors, the downstream beneficiaries are UAE construction and materials companies, logistics operators, and hospitality REITs that benefit from expanded passenger volume. Mubadala Infrastructure, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund's construction vehicle, is the obvious financial architecture behind such a project. The L&T contract win also underscores India-UAE economic partnership depth — a recurring theme as Indian capital and talent flows intensify into the GCC.

Oman's Salalah port revenue rose one-fifth year-on-year to OMR51 million as businesses reroute shipping away from the Iran-threatened Strait of Hormuz, AGBI reported. Separately, DP World announced it has moved 500,000 TEUs across the GCC via its road and rail network since March — approximately 3,000 truck movements per day — as its logistics alternative to sea routes scales rapidly, Economy Middle East reported. These two data points together confirm the Hormuz disruption trade Marcus Adebayo has been framing: GCC logistics infrastructure is absorbing disruption revenue that would normally flow through Iran's maritime chokehold. ZIM shipping's +4.01% and XME metals ETF's +4.05% in today's commodity proxy movers reinforce the theme that investors are pricing hard-asset logistics bottleneck beneficiaries. For UAE infrastructure investors: the Hormuz disruption is a medium-term structural tailwind for UAE/Oman port and logistics capex.

A market analysis by fäm Properties found that 75.5% of Dubai's 564,072 residential properties currently under construction have already been sold, with absorption rates of 90-100% for projects due to complete this year, Economy Middle East reported. Abu Dhabi's Hudayriyat Island separately topped the emirate's real estate sales for the second consecutive quarter with AED19 billion ($5.17bn) in H1 2026 volume. Both readings confirm the UAE property thesis that Marcus Adebayo has been flagging since Q1: unlike the Dubai property bubble of 2013-2015, this cycle is demand-led and undersupplied, with a large portion of the off-plan purchase cohort being wealthy Asian and European HNI buyers attracted by UAE's visa policy liberalization. Borouge Plc's $656M interim dividend for H1 2026 (reaffirming 16.2 fils per share for the full year) adds to the picture of ADX-listed blue chips returning strong cash to shareholders in this environment.