Groundbreaking News: NEOM & Finance

[sushi 19]

So. This week alone, some of the most startling revelations in years have occurred in the financial world.

Most Q3 finance reports were released Thursday, throwing some big names around for a loop.

Amazon crushed even the highest expectations, giving the company a 13% increase in valuation and making Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world with an estimated $90bn - driven primarily not by sales, but AWS (Amazon Web Services: cloud computing, hosting, and advertisements). Even WalMart, after outcompeting many of the same brick-and-mortar stores as Amazon and buying out jet.com - an online retailer attempting to undercut Amazon - is down half a percent.

AMD turned a profit for the first time since the 2000s, but still closed down a percent as Intel and Microsoft rose 7.4 and 6.4 percent, respectively.

Mattel is down 9%, with the potential to go down with Toys 'R' Us after many contracts and partnerships resulted in lackluster performance.

Macy's and CVS are also being hit, dropping around 6% each.

Expedia dropped a whopping 16% as a result of competition from Trivago and Hurricane Irma for airspace.

 

All of this is stock news, but the truly incredible story is NEOM, Saudi Arabia's new Exclusive Economic Zone. Named for Latin neo and 'm,' the first letter of the Arabic word for "future," NEOM is intended to be the cultural, financial, and technological epicenter of the world. A 10,000 sq mile development on the empty Northwestern coast of Saudi Arabia between the mountains and the Red Sea, it will occupy Saudi, Egyptian, and Jordanian territory (with a bridge across the Red Sea to Egypt), and already has a half-trillion dollar investment budget from Saudi Arabia. There is already a plan to expand that budget to up to $2tn by making an IPO and selling some ownership in state-owned oil and energy companies to the international public. It was announced as the ambitious project of the Saudi Crown Prince as part of his effort to make the country a more secular, progressive nation, free from cultural dependency on Islam and economic dependency on oil. The NEOM EEZ will be loosely connected to Saudi Arabia, mostly free from taxes and regulation, making it a haven for corporations and wealth from across the globe. It is planned to be powered entirely by cheap solar and hydroelectic energy, attracting datacenter and tech companies. Intended as a city of the future, it is designed with technology in mind: supposedly, there will be a massive fiber hub for global communications, hyperloop transportation and public support for driverless cars. Predictably, most Saudi, Jordanian, and Egyptian corporations have expressed public interest to relocate to NEOM if it should prove feasible (at least for tax reasons). It is planned as one massive megacity, with land enough to expand outward until it forms a metropolis of finance, industry, and society larger than all of the following cities combined:

Hong Kong

Aleppo

London

Hiroshima

Prague

Manchester

Stockholm

Vienna

Paris

Rome

Amsterdam

Berlin

Damascus

Havana

New York

and Los Angeles

 

 

So... whatcha think about this evolving world of economics we have here?

[ThatOllieWhoDies 1177]

Just now, nymical said:

So. This week alone, some of the most startling revelations in years have occurred in the financial world.

Most Q3 finance reports were released Thursday, throwing some big names around for a loop.

Amazon crushed even the highest expectations, giving the company a 13% increase in valuation and making Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world with an estimated $90bn - driven primarily not by sales, but AWS (Amazon Web Services: cloud computing, hosting, and advertisements). Even WalMart, after outcompeting many of the same brick-and-mortar stores as Amazon and buying out jet.com - an online retailer attempting to undercut Amazon - is down half a percent.

AMD turned a profit for the first time since the 2000s, but still closed down a percent as Intel and Microsoft rose 7.4 and 6.4 percent, respectively.

Mattel is down 9%, with the potential to go down with Toys 'R' Us after many contracts and partnerships resulted in lackluster performance.

Macy's and CVS are also being hit, dropping around 6% each.

Expedia dropped a whopping 16% as a result of competition from Trivago and Hurricane Irma for airspace.

 

All of this is stock news, but the truly incredible story is NEOM, Saudi Arabia's new Exclusive Economic Zone. Named for Latin neo and 'm,' the first letter of the Arabic word for "future," NEOM is intended to be the cultural, financial, and technological epicenter of the world. A 10,000 sq mile development on the empty Northwestern coast of Saudi Arabia between the mountains and the Red Sea, it will occupy Saudi, Egyptian, and Jordanian territory (with a bridge across the Red Sea to Egypt), and already has a half-trillion dollar investment budget from Saudi Arabia. There is already a plan to expand that budget to up to $2tn by making an IPO and selling some ownership in state-owned oil and energy companies to the international public. It was announced as the ambitious project of the Saudi Crown Prince as part of his effort to make the country a more secular, progressive nation, free from cultural dependency on Islam and economic dependency on oil. The NEOM EEZ will be loosely connected to Saudi Arabia, mostly free from taxes and regulation, making it a haven for corporations and wealth from across the globe. It is planned to be powered entirely by cheap solar and hydroelectic energy, attracting datacenter and tech companies. Intended as a city of the future, it is designed with technology in mind: supposedly, there will be a massive fiber hub for global communications, hyperloop transportation and public support for driverless cars. Predictably, most Saudi, Jordanian, and Egyptian corporations have expressed public interest to relocate to NEOM if it should prove feasible (at least for tax reasons). It is planned as one massive megacity, with land enough to expand outward until it forms a metropolis of finance, industry, and society larger than all of the following cities combined:

Hong Kong

Aleppo

London

Hiroshima

Prague

Manchester

Stockholm

Vienna

Paris

Rome

Amsterdam

Berlin

Damascus

Havana

New York

and Los Angeles

 

 

So... whatcha think about this evolving world of economics we have here?

Can you link the article about NEOM where you found out about this info?

 

[sushi 19]

I found out about NEOM from these 5 articles, the ones I initially read:

 

http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/news/economy/saudi-arabia-mega-city-neom/index.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/saudis-500-billion-plan-to-neom-business-city.html

http://www.news.com.au/travel/world-travel/middle-east/saudi-princes-bold-plan-for-a-640b-futuristic-megacity/news-story/c222397b57aaa1229a4bfadeaedfcf6d

https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2017-10-24/saudi-arabia-opens-major-conference-with-eye-on-investment?src=usn_rd

https://www.yahoo.com/news/saudi-crown-prince-announces-plans-084800816.html

 

The bit about size was from another article that used the sub-headline - "more than 20x as large as NYC" which was stupid, so I took it a step further and did the math for myself to see how many cities you could fit in the area allotted for NEOM.

[fatb0y 1337]

On 10/28/2017 at 3:55 PM, nymical said:

I found out about NEOM from these 5 articles, the ones I initially read:

 

http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/news/economy/saudi-arabia-mega-city-neom/index.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/saudis-500-billion-plan-to-neom-business-city.html

http://www.news.com.au/travel/world-travel/middle-east/saudi-princes-bold-plan-for-a-640b-futuristic-megacity/news-story/c222397b57aaa1229a4bfadeaedfcf6d

https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2017-10-24/saudi-arabia-opens-major-conference-with-eye-on-investment?src=usn_rd

https://www.yahoo.com/news/saudi-crown-prince-announces-plans-084800816.html

 

The bit about size was from another article that used the sub-headline - "more than 20x as large as NYC" which was stupid, so I took it a step further and did the math for myself to see how many cities you could fit in the area allotted for NEOM.

A random list of a bunch of cities doesn't provide any more clarity than "more than 20x as large as NYC" does.

 

NEOM will be approximately the same size as the state of Massachusetts. Which probably makes it the biggest city in the world. 

[sushi 19]

10 hours ago, fatb0y said:

A random list of a bunch of cities doesn't provide any more clarity than "more than 20x as large as NYC" does.

 

NEOM will be approximately the same size as the state of Massachusetts. Which probably makes it the biggest city in the world. 

Thanks fatb0y; your example adds credence and clarity to my post. I was going for shock value - merely saying "20x NYC!!!1!" is just seeking a headline with no effort behind it, so I made a much better shock value list... not for an impression of true size, but scale.

 

Some metropolitan areas combining multiple cities come close to this scale, though: the Greater Tokyo Area in Japan technically includes several cities, but, as their metro zones meet, it can be interpreted as one metropolis in the same way NEOM will likely develop (GT is currently the largest in the world at a little over 5k square miles). Unprecedented size, to be sure, but not necessarily a pipe dream. Though Tokyo obviously took centuries to develop, Saudi Arabia plans to accelerate the population of the city by making it a corporate and technology haven, enticing workers of high education from around the world, necessitating all the social, technical, and lower-class working positions of a city to support them, drawing in an even larger population from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and potentially even further abroad. Move over China with your "sustainable cities of the future," there's a new - much richer and much more committed - sheriff in town.

 

Also, 10/10: "probably...the biggest city in the world."