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By Hadeel Al Sayegh
RIYADH (Reuters) – Oman’s sovereign wealth fund, the Oman Investment Authority, is considering making an investment in Britain’s generation sector to take advantage of valuations hit by EM interest rates and falling pounds, an OIA official said on Wednesday.
Ibrahim Al Eisri, lead personal equity officer at OIA, told Reuters that the wealth fund is examining and developing unlisted generation corporations in the UK.
The British economy is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis as Rushi Sunak on Tuesday became its third prime minister in two months.
“We are in some deals right now, given that the market lately provides an opportunity to enter,” he said on the sidelines of the FII, Saudi Arabia’s premier annual investment conference.
Al Eisri said now is the most productive time to monetize assets compared to two years ago amid the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that the OIA abandoned four investments outside Oman last year.
The region’s oil giants, Saudi Arabia’s Aramco and Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC, have raised tens of billions of dollars in IPOs in recent years, adding from Aramco and several ADNOC subsidiaries and joint ventures, as well as selling stakes in its pipeline infrastructure.
Oman plans to publicly list 30 corporations in the coming years, he said.
The Gulf is experiencing an IPO boom lately, with the governments of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Dubai pushing state IPOs to improve the competitiveness of their inventory markets.
Issuers in the region raised more than $15 billion in IPOs in mid-October, according to Refinitiv data. Its first-half revenue outpaced European IPOs, according to the data, even as global markets remained volatile due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He added that the OIA invited investors two weeks ago to take a look at opportunities in the mining sector and also foresees the same for the fishing sector.
The fund focuses on energy technologies of choice, logistics, and messenger RNA generation used in some COVID-19 vaccines. He added that OIA is about to invest in a port in Zanzibar.
(Reporting through Hadeel Al Sayegh in Riyadh; Written through Hadeel Al Sayegh and Yousef Saba in Dubai; Editing by Hugh Lawson)