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Arab News
10 hours ago
- Business
- Arab News
Closing Bell: Saudi main index rises to close at 11,068
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia's Tadawul All Share Index rose on Thursday, gaining 94.29 points, or 0.86 percent, to close at 11,068.27. The total trading turnover of the benchmark index was SR5.72 billion ($1.52 billion), as 206 of the stocks advanced and 40 retreated. The Kingdom's parallel market Nomu gained 215.80 points, or 0.80 percent, to close at 27,053.10. This comes as 54 of the listed stocks advanced while 31 retreated. The MSCI Tadawul Index increased 11.41 points, or 0.81 percent, to close at 1,418.88. The best-performing stock of the day was Ades Holding Co., whose share price rose 6.97 percent to SR13.82. Other top performers included National Gypsum Co., whose share price increased 5.66 percent to SR22.40, as well as Zamil Industrial Investment Co., which rose 5.42 percent to SR42.80. Specialized Medical Co. recorded the most significant drop, falling 3.31 percent to SR23.36. Saudi Advanced Industries Co. also saw its stock price fall 2.55 percent to SR26.75. Al-Taiseer Group Talco Industrial Co.'s stock price declined 2.27 percent to SR43.10. Dar Al-Arkan Real Estate Development Co. has closed its 14th sukuk issuance, marking the tenth tranche under its USD-denominated Islamic Sukuk Program, with a total size of SR2.81 billion, the company said in a statement to Tadawul. The five-year sukuk, carrying an annual profit rate of 7.25 percent, was issued on June 25 and attracted strong demand from both regional and international investors. The order book reached SR10.8 billion, nearly four times oversubscribed, according to the bourse filing. The issuance comprised 3,750 sukuk units, each with a par value of $200,000. Dar Al-Arkan appointed Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank PJSC, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank PJSC, Alkhair Capital, Al Rayan Investment LLC, Arqaam Capital, Bank ABC, and Dubai Islamic Bank as joint lead managers for the transaction. Also on the mandate were Emirates NBD Capital, First Abu Dhabi Bank, J.P. Morgan, as well as Mashreq, Sharjah Islamic Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, and Warba Bank. Shares in Dar Al Arkan ended the session marginally lower, closing at SR19.22, down 0.10 percent. The Board of Directors of Sahara International Petrochemical Co., also known as Sipchem, has approved SR362 million in cash dividends for the first half of 2025, according to a statement published on Tadawul. The payout applies to 752 million eligible shares, translating to a dividend of SR0.50 per share, or 5 percent of the share's par value. Shares in Sipchem closed the session higher at SR19.06, gaining 4.24 percent.
Arab News
21-05-2025
- Business
- Arab News
Closing Bell: Saudi main index ends lower at 11,303
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia's Tadawul All Share Index closed in the red on Wednesday, falling 134.5 points, or 1.18 percent, to settle at 11,303.68. The total trading turnover reached SR4.37 billion ($1.16 billion), with 37 stocks advancing and 206 declining. The MSCI Tadawul 30 Index also dropped, losing 19.78 points, or 1.35 percent, to close at 1,441.01. The Kingdom's parallel market Nomu declined by 110.94 points, or 0.40 percent, to close at 27,417.62, with 26 stocks gaining and 49 retreating. The best-performing stock of the day was Saudi Arabia Refineries Co., rising 4.38 percent to SR69.10. Other top gainers included Perfect Presentation for Commercial Services Co., whose share price rose 3.37 percent to SR11.66, and SHL Finance Co., which gained 2.22 percent to SR20.30. The day's largest decline was seen in National Gypsum Co., with its share price dipping 4.76 percent to SR20.4. ACWA Power Co. saw its shares drop 4.40 percent to SR274, while Al-Rajhi Co. for Cooperative Insurance declined 4.17 percent to SR115. On the announcements front, ACWA Power said it has received approval from the Capital Market Authority to proceed with a SR7.12 billion capital increase through a rights issue. The CMA's decision, issued on May 20, allows the company to offer, register, and list rights issue shares — pending shareholder approval at an upcoming extraordinary general assembly. The rights issue was first disclosed on Dec. 19, when ACWA Power submitted its application to the CMA. Alinma Bank has successfully completed a $500 million issuance of dollar-denominated sustainable Additional Tier 1 capital certificates under its Tier 1 Capital Certificate Issuance Programme. The offering targets eligible investors in Saudi Arabia and internationally, with settlement expected on May 28. The issuance comprises 2,500 certificates, each with a par value of $200,000, offering an annual return of 6.5 percent. These perpetual instruments are callable after 5.5 years. The certificates will be listed on the International Securities Market of the London Stock Exchange and were offered exclusively under Regulation S of the US Securities Act of 1933. During Wednesday's session, Alinma Bank shares rose 0.18 percent to close at SR27.50 on the main market.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
D.C. Is Becoming Another Hollowed-Out Company Town
In 2008, as the Great Recession was starting to take hold, my travels reporting on Barack Obama's presidential campaign took me to one American city after another that was reeling from major layoffs. I visited places such as Kokomo, Ind., which was losing so many jobs at its Chrysler and Delphi plants that by year's end it was labeled one of America's fastest-dying towns, and Lorain, Ohio, where Mr. Obama visited a National Gypsum plant that closed four months later. After each trip, I would return to my home in Alexandria, Va., in the metro Washington, D.C., area, and be struck by how removed the nation's capital seemed from the pain being felt in so much of the country. Not only was it insulated because of its high proportion of government employment, it actually prospered as a result of the recession, since so much of the federal economic stimulus ended up staying with the Beltway contractors who administered the spending. When my growing family started looking for a larger home in 2009, we left our corner of Alexandria. As prices in every other metro area in the country were declining, they were still rising in the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia. The situation now is sharply reversed. As a result of Elon Musk's relentless scythe, the Department of Government Efficiency, the big layoffs are in and around Washington. In the week ending Feb. 22, unemployment claims in the District of Columbia rose 25 percent from the week prior and were four times as high as one year earlier — and that's only the beginning. The district's chief financial officer has predicted that the city, where the federal government accounts for roughly a quarter of all wages, could lose as many as 40,000 jobs over the next few years, more than a fifth of its total, which he estimates would cost the city more than $1 billion in revenue. The fallout is spreading through the DMV — D.C., Maryland and Virginia — a region where nearly a tenth of all jobs are with the federal government, not to mention the tens of thousands of people working for contractors dependent on federal spending. The losses are already manifest beyond the numbers: in the résumés from highly educated professionals flooding LinkedIn, in pleas from laid-off young people seeking others to take over their apartment leases, in hushed discussions about this or that family pulling up stakes and leaving town. It is also manifest in the very landscape of the city. The Trump administration briefly placed the headquarters of many government departments on a list of 'non-core' properties that are slated for offloading because they are vacant or underused — among them the Departments of Justice, Labor, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Energy and Housing and Urban Development. This conjures the prospect that those hulking Brutalist and Classic Revival buildings constructed in the 20th century could one day stand vacant, just like the abandoned 19th-century factories looming over so many of the country's postindustrial cities. All of this raises a question that was unfathomable until recently: Is the nation's capital, so long blessed by being the government's company town, at risk of a fate resembling that of so many other company towns through the years? And if it is, why aren't people beyond metro Washington more concerned about it? When Detroit was in free fall, Mr. Obama intervened to bail out the auto industry, deciding a great American city needed help. But now, the administration in power is itself driving the fateful blow to a major city. It is hard not to detect in this turnabout some resentment on the part of Trump allies and supporters from regions that have not been faring well in recent times. By 2012, when the country was finally emerging from the recession, seven of the 10 wealthiest counties were in metro Washington; the area's number of high-net-worth households, with investable assets of more than $1 million, had risen by 30 percent since 2008. While Midwestern communities such as Vice President JD Vance's hometown, Middletown, Ohio, were being crushed by the opioid epidemic, the Aston Martin dealership in Tysons Corner, Va., was selling hundreds of the bespoke James Bond car for about $280,000, and home prices in the District were approaching a 400 percent increase from the early 1990s. There is also more recent fuel for schadenfreude over Washington's pain: Federal workers were much slower than those in other industries to return to the office after the pandemic, making it easier for the Trump administration to cast the entire lot of them as cosseted and unproductive. The persistence of remote work in the federal government had in recent years given downtown Washington a desolate feel, as it contributed to the closure of countless fast-casual lunch locales, retail shops and a major movie theater. There is no small irony in the fact that Mr. Trump's return-to-office order has brought more life to downtown streets at the very moment that the city is so imperiled by impending layoffs. The DOGE cuts will not do all that much harm to the region's true economic elite. There will still be lobbyists raking in six-figure contracts. Mr. Trump has done precious little to threaten that aspect of the so-called swamp; if anything, the DOGE assault has led many sectors, such as higher education, to spend more on lobbyists. There will still be Beltway-bandit consulting firms soaking up some of the work previously done by government workers and national security contractors lining the soulless highway approach to Dulles airport. The actual target of the cuts will be a more modest sort: career civil servants who, in many cases, could have been making more money in the private sector, or security guards and office cleaners returning every evening to working-class neighborhoods in Anacostia or Prince George's County. It's these people — from housing finance analysts to food-safety researchers and administrative assistants — who are now frantically looking for other work or considering leaving the region altogether. The cuts will fall especially hard on the region's Black residents, who have long relied on federal employment as a ladder to the middle class. (Black people make up a disproportionately large share of the national federal work force.) Watching all of this unfold, I can't help but be put in mind of another company town: my own hometown, Pittsfield, Mass. It once held three major divisions of General Electric, which at its mid-20th-century peak employed more than 13,000 people in a county of about 130,000, sustaining broadly shared prosperity in a city with stellar public schools and a bustling main street. But by the time I reached high school in the late 1980s, the company was scaling back operations at a rapid clip under the leadership of Jack Welch, who had himself come up through the ranks in Pittsfield. My classmates and I watched as, one by one, the families of engineers and managers moved away and empty storefronts proliferated downtown. Ultimately, many of us decided to build our careers elsewhere. Pittsfield's population has fallen a quarter since 1970, and only 1,000-odd people remain employed at the company that took over one of the rump G.E. companies, General Dynamics. Washington is unlikely to suffer so stark a fate, given the many barnacles that have attached themselves to its economy beyond the bureaucracy. Tourists will still come by the thousands to admire the monuments, even if some of the big stone buildings turn vacant, like the ruins of the Roman Forum. But the experience of Pittsfield and so many larger company towns is a reminder of how wrenching the disruption is when the biggest employer in town takes a big hit and the ladder rungs toward upward mobility start to crumble. The echo of all those other cities' plights is reason to offer some sympathy, or at least recognition, as the Beltway now absorbs its blows.
