Gulf executives who were upset by US president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign trail comments about Muslims took a conciliatory tone following his election victory and said they were open for business with the US.
In Dubai, boards displaying Trump’s name and his support for a DAMAC Properties project to build a gated community, spa and Trump-branded golf course can be seen from a road on the edge of the city.
Gulf business links with Trump and other US firms are strong. The US imported US$32.4 billion of goods including oil from the six Gulf countries last year and the region is the most important client base for Boeing Co and a number of US defense firms.
The Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds also have hundreds of billions of dollars of US investments.
However, Arab business figures were angry about Trump’s campaign calls for Muslims to be banned from entering the US, following the murder of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by a Muslim couple in December last year.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, head of investment firm Kingdom Holding, which has stakes in US firms including Citigroup Inc and Twitter Inc, called him a “disgrace not only to the GOP [Grand Old Party] but to all America.”
However, the billionaire was among those wishing him well on Wednesday, tweeting: “President elect @realDonaldTrump whatever the past differences, America has spoken, congratulations & best wishes for your presidency.”
Another billionaire businessman, Khalaf al-Habtoor, who worked with Trump on a construction project that was halted in 2008, wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper in August last year backing Trump for the presidency.
However, al-Habtoor backtracked after Trump’s Muslim comments and said Gulf money would quit the US if he won.
Speaking to Arabian Business on Wednesday, al-Habtoor said Trump’s comments on Muslims “were for the election only” and he would now tone down his rhetoric, something that would open the door to re-establishing good relations with the Gulf.
Some Gulf firms reassessed their links with Trump at the end of last year: DAMAC temporarily removed references to his name from advertising, and regional retailer Landmark Group pulled a Trump-branded line of homeware from its Lifestyle chain of department stores.
However, a spokeswoman for DAMAC on Thursday said that Trump-linked projects still carried his name. Landmark Group declined to comment.
Mohammed al-Ardhi, executive chairman of alternative investment firm Investcorp, which has billions of dollars in US real estate and other investments, was complementary about Trump.
“Investcorp knows that Mr Trump is fair because we competed against him on the Tiffany acquisition and he did not mind us winning that deal,” al-Ardhi told an investor event on Wednesday, referring to its 1984 purchase of the New York jewelery firm.
Meanwhile, Gulf airlines are waiting to see where Trump stands on a disagreement with US carriers.
A group including American Airlines and United Airlines say United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Airlines, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways have unfairly benefited from state subsidies, and have called for a review of the Open Skies trade agreement with those countries.
Some Gulf airline executives had previously expressed concerns that Trump could favor US interests at the expense of the rest of the global aviation industry.
“It’s so important for our business that the liberalization that spreads through from the Clinton era of politics on global trade continues,” Emirates president Tim Clark told reporters in Dubai on Oct. 18, adding that Trump “may go about the introduction of more constraints on global trade.”
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to