Dubai’s Emaar Malls Q4 profit rises 5.5 pct

Dubai’s Emaar Malls, a unit of Emaar Properties, reported on Sunday a 5.5 percent rise in fourth-quarter net profit.

Emaar Malls made a net profit of 435 million dirhams ($118 million) in the three months to Dec. 31, the firm said in a bourse statement. That compared with a profit of 412.2 million dirhams in the same period a year earlier, Reuters data shows.

Rental income in the final quarter of 2015 was 821 million dirhams, the statement said. That compared with 797.3 million dirhams in the year earlier period, the company said.

Visitor arrivals across the company’s malls crossed 124 million for the whole of 2015, a rise of 9 percent compared with 2014, it said.

Emaar Properties owns about 85 percent of Emaar Malls, having floated the remainder in 2014. At the time, the 5.8 billion dirham share sale was the Gulf’s largest since 2008.

($1 = 3.6727 UAE dirham)