Dubai:Gulf Arab investors will increasingly look for opportunities outside the region, with deals in emerging markets and real estate helping to diversify holdings, an official at Credit Suisse Group AG said.
After 2001, Middle East investors began looking at their home markets, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, "and as a result outbound investments went from about 65 per cent to less than 40 per cent today", Bassam Yammine, a managing director and joint chief executive officer for the Middle East at Credit Suisse, said in an interview in Dubai. That ratio "will eventually balance out", he said.
Investors in the region "need to diversify" and are also more interested now in some emerging markets of Asia and Latin America, where growth and wealth creation has been "robust" and investors "want to participate in that shift", Yammine said.
Gulf Arab countries, which also include Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, pump more than 20 per cent of the world's crude oil and a quadrupling of oil prices in the past eight years is helping boost wealth across the region.
