City Dev

City Dev: its 54% owned Millennium & Copthorne has signed contracts to manage 11 hotels in Saudi Arabia and 1 five-star hotel in Tsibilisi, Georgia. The 11 Saudi Arabia hotels will have >4k rooms in total (with the largest hotel > 1.5k rooms); 3 hotels will open this year, with the rest slated to open over the next 3 years. Tourism is expected to stay strong in Mecca, given that Mecca has >2m pilgrims each Haj, and receives ~13m visitors every year. The Georgia hotel is M&C’s first hotel in the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe, and will open by mid-2014 with 220 rooms. Chairman Kwek Leng Beng remains positive on business and economic opportunities in the Middle East, and expects the region to see “good trade growth in the next five years”. M&C currently has 10 hotels in the region. City Dev stock is -0.5% at $9.90.