News

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia plans to spend 120 billion riyals ($32 billion) on subsidised home loans for borrowers, as it seeks to create conditions for an expanded private-sector role in a mortgage market dominated by the government. The kingdom’s new housing program, announced, also includes an 18 billion riyal loan-guarantee program to boost access to funding, and 12.5 billion riyals to ...

Bloomberg Halliburton Co. isn’t content to limit its battle for market share with Schlumberger Ltd. to the oil field these days. It’s opened a new front in an unlikely place: the patent office. The Houston-based provider of drilling services is waging an aggressive campaign to persuade the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel some of Schlumberger’s fracking-related patents, telling ...

Bloomberg Oil slid to a two-week low and headed for its longest losing streak in two months as a plunge in US equities dragged other markets lower. Crude futures in New York fell a third day, sliding as much as 1.3 percent. Stock indexes from Japan to Germany tumbled on Tuesday after a frantic sell-off in US shares sent the ...

Bloomberg Serbia and Montenegro may join the European Union by 2025, the bloc’s executive will say, urging the western Balkan countries to improve the rule of law, curb corruption and put aside past grudges to enter the world’s largest trading club. The EU is offering a path to membership two decades after the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Along ...

Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Theresa May will announce a series of steps intended to crack down on social media companies for not policing extremist and abusive content on their platforms. May has made attacks on social media for not doing enough to combat extremism a fixture of her speeches in the past two years and she is now getting more ...

Bloomberg Financial services workers will be among the first to be hit by the rise of automation while women will feel the effects earlier than men, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The report—which analysed more than 200,000 jobs across 29 countries—anticipates three stages of automation between now and the mid-2030s, which will eventually impact almost one third of UK workers. ...

Bloomberg Toyota Motor Corp. predicted a record profit this fiscal year helped in part by President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and surging sales of the updated Camry sedan and RAV4 sport-utility vehicle in the US. A reduction in expenses through cost cuts and a favorable foreign exchange environment is also helping the carmaker lift its annual net income forecast to ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. is pulling back on buying corporate bonds with its overseas cash as it prepares to bring the money home to the US, according to people with knowledge of the matter. About $157 billion of Apple’s $285 billion in cash, mostly held overseas, is invested in corporate debt, making it a leading lender. The cutback in buying, echoed ...

DUBAI / WAM The outsourcing sector is an important pillar of the UAE’s economic diversification and among the fastest-growing sectors in the country with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.2 percent, according to the ‘UAE Outsourcing Market Outlook 2016-2020’, a report by International Data Corporation (IDC). The report estimates that operational management revenues of business process outsourcing (BPO) ...

Bloomberg Dubai Holding LLC appointed Amit Kaushal as chief executive officer, replacing Edris Alrafi who left the investment firm after less than a year. Kaushal was previously chief financial officer at the conglomerate that manages about $35 billion of assets, according to an emailed statement. He was also senior vice president of funding and treasury management at property developer Meraas ...