Wanted: buyer with a plan

The Kuwaiti government wants to sell an 80% stake in loss-making national carrier Kuwait Airways, state news agency KUNA said earlier this week.

The news comes as Oman gets to grips with its own Oman Air and Bahrain takes on full responsibility for Gulf Air.

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Merger or train smash?

Everybody approves of the merger of National Bank of Dubai and Emirates Bank. Don’t they?

A new super-bank with assets of $44 billion, the biggest in the Gulf and now capable of challenging internationally, the merger of National Bank of Dubai and Emirates Bank is universally agreed to be a ’good thing’.

"It’s a very good move," says Karti Inamdar, banking analyst with Capital Intelligence, in the Gulf News. "I actually see plus-points all the way in a friendly merger of two healthy banks.”

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Brace yourselves

In the Spring of last year, Trends magazine canvassed the bosses of some of Dubai’s biggest real estate players to get some idea of where things were going in the property market. While mostly bullish – as you’d expect – two predicted a “softening” around February this year. Supply, they said, would finally catch up with demand, to an extent at least, and a correction could well be on the cards. Other analysts I spoke to were less optimistic. By October, according to some, a crash was imminent.

Well, February has come and gone, and there’s been nary a “correction,” never mind the kind of crash that your average hard-pressed (and non-property owning) expat has been hoping for. What’s happening? Was everyone mistaken? If the latest research is anything to go by, absolutely not. The supply-demand crunch has merely been subjected to the same thing that frustrates so many off-plan buyers in the region: construction delays. A correction is coming, and it could be a lot, lot bigger than anyone was expecting.

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Copycat killer

I have often complained vocally about the phenomenon known as “idea poaching,” when agencies steal ideas from one another. I was asked me to rant about this. Here I go.

The fact that I even have to talk about idea poaching is annoying in the extreme. This should be crystal clear to all parties concerned – agencies, advertisers and creatives. I don’t care if you have bi-polar disorder or if you’re taking Prozac suppositories: You know it when an idea didn’t come out of your own head. By deductive logic it must mean the idea belongs to someone else then. Get over it. And if you say the idea is yours, you are nothing by a leprous slag.

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