The International Energy Agency reports that energy demand across Southeast Asia rose at twice the global average rate in 2024 and finds that consumption is set to double by 2050. To maintain rising living standards, economies across the region are pushing into higher-value and more energy-intense industries, data centres being one obvious example.
That creates a problem.
The ASEAN nations enjoy vast but as yet largely untapped potential for renewable energy, especially PV solar, and onshore and offshore wind. The IEA puts potential supply at 20 terawatts, roughly 55 times the region’s present generation capacity. And this energy would be cheap. But the increase in overall demand is for now far outpacing new supply from renewables. Until that changes, ASEAN nations remain dependent on rising fossil fuel imports that expose them to price risk, potential supply disruptions, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Asian corporate executives have focused recently on coping with tariffs and trade restrictions, potential supply chain disruptions and geopolitical insecurity—rather than energy and power. In the latest EY-Parthenon Global CEO Outlook survey, Asia-Pacific CEOs expressed greater unease than their peers in Europe and the Americas about geopolitics, macroeconomics and trade. They must not lose sight of how investment in modernizing energy supply and transmission today will provide considerable benefits including, but not limited to, low-cost power. And they should mobilize all sources of finance, private and public, for projects to achieve this.
That is why the recent announcement from the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and ASEAN of a new financing initiative to support a connected ASEAN power grid (APG) is so important. It comes ahead of an enhanced memorandum of understanding set to be signed later this year by the ASEAN nations to finally realize the vision for a connected grid that has tantalized since the 1990s.
Building it will be expensive, estimated at over $750 billion. But the returns—cheaper and more reliable electricity, enhanced energy security and regional co-operation, lower emissions—will justify the cost, as long as finance can be mobilized.
At the ASEAN ministers on energy meeting in October, the ADB committed up to $10 billion over the next ten years. The World Bank is providing an initial $2.5 billion. The multilaterals will also offer grants, guarantees, political risk insurance and other concessions to attract private capital, as well as technical assistance.
Why has this connected grid not been built already? Partly for technical reasons. ASEAN nations use different voltages in their transmission systems. Their national grids stand at varying levels of sophistication. They employ distinct operating standards and regulatory frameworks. Politics has also played a part. Countries have previously prioritized domestic industrial development and national energy policies.
Increasing urgency around energy transition has shifted those priorities and focused on how to transmit renewable energy from the widely distributed sources that provide it to the consumers that need it, even in other countries. The key now is to progress beyond simply connecting countries’ networks to a more widespread upgrading of national grids.
In May, leading energy companies from Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam agreed a strategic partnership to explore the use of undersea cables to transmit electricity generated mainly from Vietnam’s offshore wind farms through the Peninsular Malaysia National Grid to homes and businesses in Malaysia and Singapore.
Vietnam is prioritizing investment in offshore wind as part of a strategy to become a regional renewable energy hub. Singapore, while lacking the natural resources for large-scale renewables, intends to be a key enabler of cross-border trade in clean energy. It has given conditional approval for ten projects to import it, including solar power from Australia; solar, hydropower and potentially wind power from Cambodia; and solar power from Indonesia; as well as offshore wind from Vietnam. Thailand could be another big importer.
High return on investment
The vision for an ASEAN power grid, connecting a population likely to hit 780 million by 2040 across a $10 trillion regional economy, triple the size in 2022, was laid out one year ago at COP29. Doubling the number of interconnections across the 10 ASEAN countries could boost connected capacity from 7.2 gigawatts in 2022, to 33.5 GW fifteen years from now.
This will take more than undersea cables and high voltage direct current lines capable of transmitting power over long distances with minimal leakage. To succeed at scale a resilient ASEAN grid must cope with the key challenge faced in all renewables—intermittency. This necessitates investments in industrial-scale battery and other storage and conversion technology to balance increasingly variable supply with rising demand. Managing that balance is essential to keep grids stable and prevent outages, including amid extreme weather events that coincide with peak power off-take.
Upgrading domestic networks should include integration of new digital technology, familiar from the internet of things, to monitor and measure systems continuously, spot potential weaknesses before they trip supply, and enable steady maintenance instead of expensive repairs.
An ASEAN power grid paves the way to lower cost manufacturing and enhances competitive advantages, as the region continues to move up the manufacturing value chain.
In the longer term, it can also improve climate-resilient food security and pitch the region into a positive feedback loop. Related investment in agritech might also boost production of biofuel, potentially making air travel greener and helping to decarbonize other sectors that are difficult to electrify.
A significant proportion of total employment across Asia Pacific is in sectors directly impacted by climate, like farming and fishing, putting populations at high risk from global warming and rising sea levels. With the ASEAN grid, governments, large utilities, energy companies and financers are coming together to address this risk, and build a project that promises huge benefits for generations to come.
A woman stands in an office by the window and makes a phone call via a headset. The top female managers of Germany’s largest companies earned significantly less in 2024 and fell behind their male colleagues, according to the findings of a study by the consulting firm EY which was seen by dpa. Annette Riedl/dpa
The top female managers of Germany’s largest companies earned significantly less in 2024 and fell behind their male colleagues, according to the findings of a study by the consulting firm EY which was seen by dpa.
The salary of female board members in the DAX, MDax and SDax has fallen sharply, while men have earned slightly more.
This reverses a long-standing trend: for the first time since 2014, women on the boards of top companies were paid less than men.
Just a few years ago, there were very few women on the boards of stock exchange companies, which buoyed their salaries and meant that female managers overtook men.
But that has changed, explains EY Partner Jens Massmann: “The times when female board members were a rare species and could demand very high salaries are over.”
In 2024, the remuneration of female board members in the companies from the three DAX indices fell to an average of €2.15 million ($2.51 million), excluding chief executive positions. This was 11% less than in the previous year.
In contrast, their male colleagues recorded a slight increase of 0.4% to €2.27 million.
Overall, the remuneration of management board members fell by 3% to an average of €2.57 million. The salaries of the chief executives fell just as sharply.
According to the study, the best-paid female manager was Merck boss Belen Garijo with €7.6 million. She was followed by Deutsche Bank board member Rebecca Short with €6.5 million and Helen Giza, the chief executive of Fresenius Medical Care with a salary of €5.7 million.
Exposing years-old concerns about California’s resilience to wildfires, a government whistleblower and other witnesses in a recent state trial alleged that cleanup operations after some of the largest fires in state history were plagued by mismanagement and overspending — and that toxic contamination was at times left behind in local communities.
Steven Larson, a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, failed to convince a jury that he was wrongly fired by the agency for flagging those and other issues to his supervisors. After a three-week trial in Sacramento, the jury found Larson was retaliated against, but also that the agency had other, legitimate reasons for dismissing him from his post, according to court records.
Still, the little-discussed trial provided a rare window into a billion-dollar public-private industry that is rapidly expanding — and becoming increasingly expensive for taxpayers and lucrative for contractors — given the increased threat of fires from climate change.
It raised serious questions about the state’s fire response and management capabilities at a time when the Trump administration says it is aggressively searching for “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, proposing cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and clashing with state leaders over the best way to respond to future wildfires in California.
The allegations raised in the trial also come as FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are overseeing similar debris removal work — by some of the same contractors — following the wildfires that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and parts of Altadena in January, and as fresh complaints arise around that work, as The Times recently reported.
Steve Larson poses for a portrait at Elk Grove Park on Sept. 1. Larson, who was a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is a whistleblower alleging widespread problems in California fire cleanups.
(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)
During the trial, Larson and other witnesses with direct knowledge of state fire contracts raised allegations of poor oversight and sloppy hiring and purchasing practices by CalRecycle, the state agency that oversaw multiple major cleanup contracts for CalOES; overcharging and poor record-keeping by contractors; toxic contamination being left behind on properties meant to have been cleared; and insufficient responses to those problems from both CalOES and FEMA officials.
The claims were buttressed at trial by the introduction into evidence of a previously unpublished audit of cleanup operations for several large fires in 2018. They were mostly rejected by attorneys for the state, who acknowledged some problems — which they said are common in fast-paced emergency responses operations. They broadly denied Larson’s allegations as baseless, saying he was an inexperienced and disgruntled former employee who was fired for poor performance.
The allegations were also dismissed by CalOES and by Burlingame-based Environmental Chemical Corp., which was the state’s lead contractor on the 2018 fires and is now the Army Corps of Engineer’s lead contractor on cleanup work for the Palisades and Eaton fires, which is nearing completion.
Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for CalOES, defended the agency’s work in a statement to The Times. While acknowledging some problems in the past, she said the agency is “committed to protecting the health and safety of all Californians, including in the aftermath of disasters, and is unwavering in its desire to maintain a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can feel respected and thrive.”
In its own statement to The Times, ECC said it followed the directives and oversight of state and federal agencies at all times, and “is proud of its work helping communities recover from devastating disasters.”
“We approach each project with professionalism, transparency, and a commitment to delivering results under extraordinarily challenging conditions,” the company said.
Maria Bourn, one of Larson’s attorneys, told The Times that while her client lost at trial — which they are appealing — his case marked a “win for government accountability and the public at-large” by revealing “massive irregularities by wildfire debris removal contractors” who continue to work in the state.
“The state’s continued partnership with these companies when such widespread irregularities were identified by one of its own should alarm every taxpayer,” Bourn said.
A Malibu home lies in ruins after the Woolsey fire. Many questions were raised about the response.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Camp, Woolsey and Hill fires
The allegations centered in large part around the state-run cleanup efforts following the Camp fire in Northern California, which killed 85 people and all but erased the town of Paradise in November 2018, and the contemporaneous Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California, which ripped through Malibu and other parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
FEMA has reimbursed the state more than $1 billion for costs associated with those cleanup efforts.
In a July 28, 2019, email entered as evidence in the trial, Larson wrote to CalOES chief of internal audits Ralph Zavala that he wanted to talk to him about “potential fraud” by Camp fire contractors, including ECC.
“I cannot say for sure, but something sure smells fishy,” Larson wrote in the email. “Either their contract was not in fact the lowest bid or they are creating fraud in the way they collect debris.”
Larson wrote in the same email that ECC was “supposedly the lowest bidder” but was “costing more” than the lower bids, which he wrote “doesn’t make sense.” At trial, Larson and his attorneys repeatedly claimed that instead of properly investigating his claims, his supervisors turned against him.
Other current and former state officials testified that they had raised similar concerns.
Todd Thalhamer, a former Camp fire area commander and operations chief who still works for CalRecycle, testified during the trial that he’d told Larson he believed ECC had low-balled its bid to win the work, then overcharged the state by millions of dollars. He said he had “dug very deep into the tonnage cost that they were charging, how they were charging, how they were cleaning it up,” and believed that ECC had been able to “game the system” by reporting that it was hauling out more of the debris types for which it could charge the most.
ECC denied manipulating bids or overcharging the state, and said that “all debris types and volumes are 100% inspected by and determined by CalRecycle and its monitoring representatives and systems, not by ECC or its subcontractors.”
Thalhamer testified that he’d sent an “email blast” out to top CalOES and CalRecycle officials telling them of his findings. He said that led to internal discussions and some but not all issues being resolved.
Further concerns were raised in records obtained by Larson’s attorneys from the prominent accounting firm EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, which the state paid nearly $4 million to audit the Camp, Woolsey and Hill fire cleanup work.
According to those records, which were cited at trial, EY found that CalRecycle was “unable to produce documentation that fully supports how the proposed costs were determined to be reasonable when evaluating contractor proposals,” and didn’t appear to have “appropriate controls or oversight over the contractor’s performance.”
EY flagged $457 million charged by the contractors through 89 separate “change orders” — or additional charges not contemplated in their initial bids. It said the state lacked an adequate approval process for determining whether to accept such orders, couldn’t substantiate them and risked FEMA rescinding its funding if it didn’t take “immediate corrective action.”
EY specifically flagged $181 million in change orders for the construction of two “base camps” near the burn areas, from which the contractors would operate. It said the state only had invoices for $91 million of that spending, and that even those invoices were not itemized. EY executive Jill Powell testified that the firm believed such large contract changes were likely to be flagged as questionable by FEMA.
ECC — one of two contractors EY noted as having made the base camp change orders — defended its work.
The company said change orders are a necessary part of any cleanup operation, where the final cost “depends on the final quantities of debris that the Government directs the Contractors to remove and how far the material has to be transported for recycling or disposal.”
Such quantities can change over the course of a contract, which leads to changes in cost, it said.
As for the base camps, ECC said the state had explicitly stated in its initial request for proposals that it would “develop the requirements” and negotiate their cost through change orders, because details about their likely location and size were still being worked out when the bids were being accepted.
“Bidders could not know at the time of bid, which area of Paradise they would be assigned, how many properties would be assigned to the bidder, and therefore the exact size of the workforce that the Government would want housed in a Base Camp,” ECC said.
ECC said it “submitted invoices with supporting documentation in the format requested” by CalRecycle for all expenditures, and was “not aware of any missing invoices.”
“We cannot speak to what EY was provided from the State’s files or how the State provided those materials for EY’s review,” the company said. “Any gap in what EY reviewed should not be interpreted as meaning ECC failed to submit documentation.”
ECC said state officials only ever complimented the company for its work on the 2018 fires. And it said it continues to work in Southern California “with the same professionalism and care we bring to every project.”
SPSG, the second contractor EY flagged as being involved in the base camp change orders, did not respond to a request for comment.
Attorney James F. Curran, who represented the state at trial, said in his closing arguments that the work was not “running perfect” but was coming in on schedule and under budget. He said state officials were not ignoring problems, just cataloging non-pressing issues in order to address them when the dust cleared, as is common in emergency operations.
Curran said many of Larson’s complaints were based on his unfamiliarity with such work and his refusal to trust more experienced colleagues. He said Larson was fired not for flagging concerns, but because of “misconduct, arrogance, communication style problems, and performance problems.”
Gore, the CalOES spokeswoman, said CalRecycle awarded the contracts “through an open, competitive procurement process with oversight from CalOES and FEMA,” and that CalOES worked to address problems with contractors before Larson ever voiced any concerns.
Gore said CalOES hired EY to identify any potential improvements in the contracting and reimbursement process, and changed its policy to pay contractors per parcel of land cleared rather than by volume of debris removed in part to address concerns about potential load manipulation.
She said the agency could not answer other, detailed questions from The Times about the debris removal process and concerns about mismanagement and alleged overcharging because the Larson case “remains pending and subject to appeal,” and because CalOES faces “other, active litigation” as well.
The EY audit also flagged issues with several other contractors, including Tetra Tech and Arcadis, according to draft records obtained from EY by Larson’s attorneys and submitted as evidence at trial.
The EY records said Tetra Tech filed time sheets for unapproved costs, without sufficient supporting information, with questionable or excessive hours, with digital alterations that increased hourly rates, and without proper supervisor approvals. It said it also charged for work without providing any supporting time sheets.
The EY records said the company also used inconsistent procedures for sampling soil and testing for asbestos, used billing rates that were inconsistent between its contract and its invoices, charged for “after hours” work without supporting documentation, filed questionable, per-hour lodging costs, appeared to have digitally edited change orders after they were signed and dated, and relied inappropriately on questionable digital signatures for approving change orders.
Tetra Tech did not respond to a request for comment.
The EY records said Arcadis filed change orders for costs that appeared to be part of the “normal course of business,” filed invoices for work that began before the company’s state contract was signed, and relied inappropriately on digital signatures.
Arcadis referred all questions to CalRecycle. CalRecycle provided a copy of its own “targeted” audit of Arcadis’ work, which found the company had complied with the requirements of its nearly $29-million contract with the state. CalRecycle otherwise referred The Times back to CalOES.
A recovery team searches for human remains after the Camp fire.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
North Bay fires
Concerns about cleanup work following major fires in Sonoma, Santa Rosa and other North Bay counties in 2017 — under both CalOES and the Army Corps of Engineers — also arose at the trial.
Sean Smith, a former 20-year veteran of CalOES and a prominent figure in California debris removal operations to this day, alleged in an email submitted at trial that ECC and other contractors hired to clear contaminated debris and soil from those fires over-excavated sites in order “to boost loads to get more tonnage and money.”
ECC denied Smith’s claims, saying it “does not perform excessive soil removal” and that it followed “the detailed debris removal operations plan requirements” of the Army Corps of Engineers, which had its own quality assurance representatives monitoring the work.
In a deposition, Smith also testified that, in the midst of spending more than $50 million to repair that over-excavation, state officials identified lingering contamination at “what would be considered hazardous waste levels.”
“They hadn’t finished the cleanup in all spots, and we found it, and we recorded it,” he said.
Smith testified that those findings were presented to high-ranking CalOES and FEMA officials during a meeting in San Francisco in October 2018. At that meeting, CalOES regional manager Eric Lamoureux laid out all the state’s contamination findings in detail, “but nobody wanted to hear it,” Smith said.
During his deposition, Smith alleged that the “exact words” of one FEMA attorney in attendance were, “We have to find out how to debunk the state’s testing” — which he said he found surprising, given the testing was based on federal environmental standards.
“I don’t know how you’d debunk such a thing,” Smith said.
FEMA officials did not respond to requests for comment. CalOES also did not answer questions about the alleged meeting.
ECC said that Smith, who managed and signed its contracts with CalOES, gave ECC “a very positive performance review” when it completed the Sonoma and Santa Rosa work — describing its work as “exceptional.”
Smith said he quit his post working on those fires after the San Francisco meeting, though he continued working for the agency in other roles for a couple more years. Smith more recently formed his own debris removal consulting firm — which has been involved in soil testing for the state after other recent fires.
CalOES did not respond to questions about Smith’s claims or separation from the agency.
The Ernst & Young (EY) Ignite Learning Week in May offered employees at the consulting and strategy firm a chance to upskill by taking online courses like “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time” and “How strong is your digital brand in the marketplace?”
However, a report from The Financial Times revealed an unexpected consequence of the week: getting fired for “cheating.” EY staff who virtually attended more than one course at the same time were let go.
EY requires staff to complete 40 education credits per year, and the classes went towards that total. The firm said that dozens of employees were caught taking multiple courses simultaneously.
To the employees, being fired reportedly came as a shock, considering the overall culture at EY.
Some told FT that they’ve seen other employees do things like take two client calls at once. To them, the company has “a culture of multitasking,” complete with three monitors per person.
According to Glassdoor, the average base salary at EY in New York City is $105,000 yearly, with an average annual bonus of $10,000.
Cheating is a sensitive issue for EY. In 2022, the firm had to pay a $100 million penalty, the largest ever fine leveled against a company of its type, after the Securities and Exchange Commission found that its employees cheated on professional exams and education courses.
EY joins Meta in firing employees who misuse perks. Last week Meta reportedly let go of close to two dozen employees who used a $25 dinner voucher for items other than dinner over an extended period of time.
Generative AI utilization is a table stake for financial services industry leaders looking to improve customer experience, internal processes and risk management. According to a Dec. 11 report by consulting giant EY, 99% of financial services industry leaders have deployed AI and are planning to use the tech across their operations. EY surveyed 300 executives […]
If you’re a Fortune 500 CEO, you rely on the “Big Four.” Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and EY have dominated the accounting space since there was a “Big Five,” an era that ended with the “Andersen Effect” from the $63 billion collapse of Enron amid accounting scandal. But Arthur Andersen is no more, and five have become four.
Accounting firms have a critical role in verifying the finances of the companies they audit so that those clients can rely on and publish accurate snapshots of their businesses. Lately, a startlingly high number of those audits are filled with errors and other flaws, according to a report released by a congressional watchdog on Monday.
Not coincidentally, that watchdog, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, was created by Congress in 2002 as the virtual embodiment of the Andersen Effect. With a mandate of protecting investors and public interest, it looks under the hood at the accounting industry so another Enron can’t happen, and what it’s found 21 years later is that the audit industry in a “completely unacceptable” state. A whopping third of all audits conducted by U.S. global accounting firms in 2022, including the Big Four, had errors in them, according to the report by the PCAOB. That’s up nine percentage points from the 21% error rate in 2021. And make no mistake, as audit reviews go, the 2023 version from the PCAOB was scathing.
This increase in errors may not just be a product of sloppy work by auditors, thought: The mistakes have likely been there for years, and are only being uncovered at a higher rate now because they tend to be found during economic instability.
Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and EY did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
‘Completely unacceptable’
For audits conducted by all accounting firms, including those based overseas and unaffiliated with a global network, the rate of mistakes was even higher. Out of all the 710 audits that PCAOB reviewed in 2022, 40% contained errors, up six percentage points from 2021. There was an uptick in failures to execute the “basic audit steps sufficiently,” PCAOB found, such as the use of non-credible data to support the conclusions.
“40% is completely unacceptable,” PCAOB chair Erica Y. Williams said at a Tuesday press conference. “What I like to think about is not what is an acceptable deficiency rate, but what can these firms do to fix this problem and reverse this troubling trend.”
The audit clients that received faulty audits were not disclosed by the PCAOB.
There was a large jump in errors in non-U.S. global auditing firms, with the percentage of flawed audits nearly doubling from 17% to 31% in 2022. According to the report, some firms that did internal analyses attribute the rise in errors to above average staff turnover, a generally less experienced staff makeup, and the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work.
But at the press conference, Williams said these excuses don’t explain such a high number of errors.
“Some firms have said the ongoing impacts of COVID-19 and the Great Resignation, the War on Talent, could be contributing factors, but we’re three years out from the start of the pandemic and these challenges are no longer new,” Williams said. “Firms really do have a responsibility to meet the challenges head-on. Forty percent deficiency rate simply cannot be explained away by the pandemic.”
‘We always see an uptick in accounting fraud’
Part of the problem lies with the lack of oversight systems used by the auditing firms, not just employee error, PCAOB wrote. Some firms lack any quality control system, or even a monitoring procedure to check that workers adhere to professional standards in their accounting and auditing, according to the report. And some firms that do have inspection procedures aren’t performing them, the report added.
While turnover rates, remote work models, and lack of procedure may all be contributing factors to that 40%, it may also be that the economic climate is making it easier to uncover such errors–or making it more difficult to conceal them.
Historically, more cases of fraud have been discovered during economic slowdowns, said Dr. Feng Gu, chair of accounting and law at the University at Buffalo School of Management.
“Every time there is an economic slowdown, whether it’s a significant economic recession or some sort of crisis, we always see an uptick in accounting fraud,” Gu said. “Accounting fraud is related to audit failure because auditors didn’t catch these mistakes or problems in the first place.”
Mistakes are easier to bury during periods of growth, according to Gu. When the economy is strong and a company is thriving, underlying problems can be obscured with positive reports of growing business. It makes it harder for auditors, and the auditors’ auditors (i.e., the PCAOB) to catch deficiencies. Now, because the economic climate is unstable, or at least not in a period of breakneck growth, accounting errors are easier to detect.
What about the fact that the economy has so far repelled the widely predicted recession this year? Gu noted that 2023 has already seen a regional banking crisis, including the historic collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, “And then for almost a year, people have been talking about a looming economic recession.” Echoing the thesis of a “rolling recession,” in which the economy as a whole keeps growing but certain sectors experience retraction, Gu said, “There has been some kind of slowdown in some industry sectors, and this is actually a good condition for financial accounting problems to be exposed.”
Williams said that the deficiencies found in 2022 have been trends in PCAOB reviews for a long time, and auditing firms need to identify ways to prevent these recurring errors. She said her organization is trying to stem the problem by shining a light on consistent mistakes through disseminating their findings to the press, potential customers, and investors.
It’s clear PCAOB is feeling the Andersen Effect—it doesn’t want the Big Four to shrink any further. “Audit quality is moving in the wrong direction,” Williams said. “The firms must turn it around.”
In this June 15, 2015 file photo, a Saudi man walks through the Tadawul Saudi Stock Exchange in the … [+] Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali)
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The Middle East is bucking a global slump in stock market listings, with an almost 300% rise in the number of companies making their debuts on bourses across the region so far this year.
According to data from consultancy firm EY, there have been 31 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the region in the first nine months of 2022, up 288% on the same period in 2021. Between them, these deals have raised some $14.7 billion, up 550% year-on-year.
The pace of new listings has been slowing down as the year has progressed, but the oil windfall that the region’s energy producers are enjoying means the level of activity is expected to remain relatively high for some time.
There were 15 IPOs in the first three months of the year, raising a combined $4 billion. In the second quarter the number of listings dropped to nine, although the amount raised grew to $9 billion.
In the most recent quarter, from July-September, there were seven listings which between them raised $1.5 billion in proceeds. The largest of these was the Dubai road toll operator Salik, which raised more than $1 billion. However, most of the deals were in Saudi Arabia, accounting for five of the seven. The only other one was in Morocco, where Disty Technologies raised $17m on the Casablanca Stock Exchange.
Despite the relative slowdown over the course of the year, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is outperforming most other parts of the world when it comes to stock market activity.
In the first three quarters of this year, there have been a total of 992 IPOs worldwide, according to EY, some 44% less than in the opening nine months of 2021. Between them they have raised $146 billion, a 57% drop year-on-year. The consultancy says the U.S. is set to record its lowest proceeds from stock market listings in almost 20 years.
“Despite IPO volumes and values declining significantly in the majority of other global markets, the MENA region continues to forge its own path with a steady stream of new listings in Q3, adding to the large number of IPOs already announced across exchanges in the year-to-date,” said Brad Watson, MENA strategy and transactions leader at EY.
Many parts of the world are facing constraints on economic activity, with high oil prices feeding into rising inflation and dampening investor sentiment. However, in the Middle East many countries are enjoying a surge in oil and gas revenues, which is leading to improved investor sentiment. As a result, most local stock markets have been rising this year, led by the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange which is up 15% so far this year.
IPO pipeline
There continues to be a strong pipeline of new deals, with EY describing the outlook for IPOs in the MENA region in the final quarter of 2022 and into 2023 as “promising”.
Gregory Hughes, EY’s IPO and transaction diligence leader for the MENA region, said investor confidence in the region has remained high “despite challenging financial headwinds across the world. As we look into Q4, we see no signs of that changing.”
Among the deals coming to the market are Saudi utility Marafiq, which secured $897 million in orders for its shares in early October and is due to make its market debut in the coming days. The Dubai government is also planning to sell a 10% stake in district cooling firm Empower next month, with a book-building exercise expected to start on October 31.
Slightly further out, oil giant Saudi Aramco is planning to sell a stake in its energy trading division either later this year or in 2023 and grocery retailer Lulu Group International is planning to list on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange next year.
Dallas, TX , December 29, 2017 (Newswire.com)
– Dallas Business Journal recognizes Dr. Sulman Ahmed, Founder & CEO of DECA Dental Group, as one of the selected 2018 Minority Business Leader honorees. After having judges review more than 100 nominations, Tracy Merzi, publisher of DBJ, notes that the 2018 class of honorees “represent the best of the best in North Texas.”
Now in its 11th year, the Minority Business Leader Awards honor men and women throughout Dallas-Fort Worth for exceptional business and community leadership.
It’s an honor to be in a position where I can influence minorities in business through my story.
Dr. Sulman Ahmed , Founder & CEO of DECA Dental
“This nomination hits home for me,” said Dr. Ahmed. “It’s an honor to be in a position where I can influence minorities in business through my story.”
All honorees were chosen because of their striking career track record and their impact on the community. As the 2017 Entrepreneur of the Year, Dr. Ahmed proves to other minorities that all things are possible. He understands the value of being given a chance and will continue to strive for diversity in the workplace in the years to come. Dr. Ahmed inspires others with his story and offers a sense of hope and determination for those who don’t believe in themselves.
About DECA Dental:
DECA Dental is a Dental Service Organization located in Dallas, Texas with over 70 offices located throughout Texas including Ideal Dental and other affiliated brands. The company’s mission is to put smiles on the faces of hundreds of patients that visit its offices daily. DECA enables its doctors to deliver quality and affordable dental care by requiring ongoing training, education and mentoring for all doctors. This, in addition to an internal clinical review board, ensures that every doctor is delivering the best care possible.
DECA is just as dedicated to the community as it is to its patients. DECA is a proud supporter of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the exclusive provider of dental services to Kidd’s Kids, Pat and Emmitt Smith Charities, the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
DECA Dental Group was founded in 2008 by CEO, Dr. Sulman Ahmed. His belief in putting patients first is the fundamental backbone of DECA Dental’s core values and patient care delivery model. Under Dr. Ahmed’s leadership, DECA Dental has received many honors and awards including being recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 5000 fastest growing companies in the nation and D Magazine’s Dallas-Fort Worth’s Premier Dental Group. Dr. Ahmed was also named as a finalist for the 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year.
To learn more information about DECA Dental, visit decadental.com.
