By Daliah Merzaban
DUBAI (Reuters) - Gulf Arab investors are increasingly looking to Asia to invest windfall oil revenue, eager to ride the rise of China and India and diversify away from their traditional ties with the United States.
"If you look at some of the big investment houses in the region, their appetite for Chinese is high," Nasser al-Shaali, chief executive of the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) Authority, told the Reuters Middle East Investment Summit this week.
Public and private companies in the world's largest oil-exporting region want to take luxury hotel and resort brands to Beijing and Shanghai, invest in Indian power stations and funnel billions of dollars into Pakistani real estate.
"What you are going to see is a capital moving eastward from the Middle East," said Shaali, whose dollar-based investment zone in the Arab world's commercial hub hopes to eventually rival financial centers in London, New York and Hong Kong.
Gulf Arab investors have spent around $94 billion on foreign mergers and acquisitions since 1997, about two-thirds of that in 2005 and 2006.
But only 10-15 percent of the $1.1 trillion surplus regional oil producers accumulated between 2003 and 2007 has entered regional economies, Shaali said.
The United States, a traditional home for parking petrodollars, may be falling out of favor as investors count the risk that assets in the U.S. could be targeted over security concerns since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"We try to avoid deals that have a political angle to it," said Atif Abdulmalik, chief executive of Arcapita, a Bahrain-based Islamic investment bank. Continued...
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.
| Autos II | Sep 30 - Oct 01, 2008 | Hotels/Casinos |
| Restructuring | Sep 22 - 26, 2008 | Financial Services/Exchanges |
| Autos | Sep 15 - 17, 2008 | Autos |
| Russia Investment | Sep 08 - 9, 2008 | Country Summits |
| Paper | Aug 20 - 21, 2008 | Manufacturing |
