Dubai-based Alam Steel Ltd yesterday announced a Dh100 million joint venture with South Africa’s Macsteel SA as part of a Dh1 billion five-year expansion programme across the Gulf region.  The 50:50 joint venture facility in Jebel Ali Free Zone, to be operational within a year, will be Middle East’s first service centre for processing high grade steel plates, said Shyam Bhatia, Chairman of Alam Steel, which also operates a 500,000 tonne steel debar processing plant in in Dubai Investment Park. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nokia is paying €264 million to buy-out the other shareholders in handset software firm Symbian, a move believed to be an attempt to compete with, among others, Google’s planned Android operating system. The Finnish vendor, which already owns 48 percent of the UK-based software firm, said Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens had agreed to sell their stakes in Symbian, and added that Samsung was also expected to accept the offer. Symbian’s software is used in two-thirds of smartphones and 6 percent of all mobile phones. Symbian’s closest rival is Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. Nokia expects the acquisition to reach break-even in 2010, and boost earnings in 2011. “The move’s a shrewd response to growing threats from other providers of mobile phone software,” CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber told Reuters, citing the open-source LiMo Foundation as well as Google and Apple.

Meanwhile, Symbian said the takeover is “a fundamental step” in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, which will attempt to unite several different existing operating systems - Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP - to create one open mobile software platform. Expected to start operating in the first half of 2009, the foundation will bring together Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to collaborate on a new, royalty-free open software platform for mobile phones. 

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Larsen & ToubroLarsen & Toubro India’s biggest construction and engineering company, is planning to bid for the Muscat airport development. Larsen & ToubroLarsen & Toubro is pre-qualified for the multimillion project, which will have several packages, sources familiar with the development said. Each package will be tendered separately. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dubai is picking up the mantle of the financial capital of the world, as global banking sectors London and New York continue to fade on the back of the global credit crises.

The new mantra in New York and London is “Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye”, as job losses mount in both cities while opportunities in the east continue to rise. Lehman Brothers on Tuesday became the latest investment bank moving one of its most senior positions to the UAE. Philip Lynch, the bank’s co-head of equities for Europe and the Middle East, will be relocating to Dubai after serving more than two decades in London. Read the rest of this entry »

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Malaysia’s Sarawak state has received 1.4 billion ringgit ($438.2 million) in foreign investment for a proposed new zone making halal products, Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud told reporters on Monday.

He was speaking on the sidelines of a conference on halal products ranging from food to pharmaceuticals. “To date we have received shows of interest for 1.4 billion ringgit of investments. They are from Taiwan and the Middle East,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

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