Abu Dhabi / WAM The overall number of new commercial licenses registered by the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, ADDED’s Abu Dhabi Business Centre (ADBC) during the first half of 2016 has reached 4,787. The first quarter has seen 2,339 licenses while the second quarter scored 2,448 licenses, which brought the overall number of licenses in the Emirate of ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business The GCC healthcare market is rapidly expanding, with connected hospitals and healthcare providers re-imagining the industry with wearables, machine monitoring, and patient record digitisation. Both startups and established technology firms are transforming healthcare technology, showcasing the latest developments at GITEX Technology Week 2016. The GCC is investing at least USD 2 billion in new patient-management ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business A month from now, the largest banking technology and innovation summit gets underway in Dubai. Organized by Expotrade, the sixth edition of the Middle East Banking Innovation Summit will be held on September 5 and 6 at Palazzo Versace, Dubai. Focusing on the latest banking techniques and innovations impacting Middle East region’s banking sector, summit ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business Prominent Asian direct selling company, QNET, is on an ambitious growth strategy for 2016 in the MENA region. The company is working with beauty and lifestyle product manufacturers in UAE, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia to source and develop exclusive products from within the region that will support local small and medium enterprises. Khaled Diab, Regional ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business The use of captive insurance companies to fund employee benefit insurance continues to evolve globally as organisations look for new ways to manage rising costs. Companies now increasingly go beyond using their captive vehicle purely to save money on their annual employee benefits bill. According to a study by Willis Towers Watson, the primary driver ...

  Bloomberg Hedge funds have gone all-in on lower oil prices, counting on seasonal weakness to play out again this year. Money managers increased wagers on declining crude prices to a record as futures dropped to the lowest in more than three months. US crude inventories climbed for a second week as imports arrived at the fastest pace since 2012. ...

  Bloomberg Centrica Plc’s Rough, the UK’s largest natural gas storage facility 9,000 feet below the North Sea bed, unexpectedly closed for the summer and will probably remain unavailable for most of the winter. The shutdown whipsawed prices in Europe’s biggest market. Here’s what you should know. WHY DOES GAS STORAGE MATTER? Natural gas is used to heat more than ...

  Bloomberg Libya has started maintenance work at Es Sider port, the nation’s largest oil export terminal, as part of plans to increase output from Africa’s biggest holder of crude reserves. Exports should resume in a month once official orders are received to reopen the port, Galal Mohamed, head of operations at Waha Oil Co. , said in a phone ...

  AFP Imagine one of the largest solar farms ever at the site of the world’s worst man-made nuclear disaster that struck Chernobyl in modern-day Ukraine and sowed panic across Europe. That is the grand vision of Ukrainian Environment Minister Ostap Semerak, backed up by big-time investors such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The Chernobyl catastrophe ...

  Beijing / AFP China’s economy, the world’s second largest, struggled in July with a worse-than-expected trade performance as imports plunged 12.5 percent year-on-year, Customs said. Imports fell to $132.4 billion, data showed, as weaker global commodity prices and lacklustre domestic demand weighed on purchases. The drop in imports was significantly larger than expectations for a 7.0 percent fall, the ...