Gulf capital buys ports in Africa, Chinese advertisers dominate Russia's app store, and Australian money funds an Indonesian battery zone

The Financial Times reports that the United Arab Emirates is investing heavily in land, ports and political influence across Africa, and that the commercial and strategic objectives behind those investments are entangled in ways that carry a cost for both the Gulf state and its hosts. Emirati port and logistics operators now hold positions along both African coasts, giving a middle power leverage over trade routes that once ran through European and American corporate hands.

A second channel runs east. TASS reported that Ilya Ulyanov, business development director at RuStore, said Chinese game publishers accounted for around 80 percent of total foreign advertising spending on the Russian app store in the first six months of the year. Russia's domestic app store exists because Western platforms withdrew, and Chinese publishers have filled the space that departure created.

A third runs south. Antara reported that Pure Battery Technologies, an Australian company, has committed $350 million to the Batang special economic zone in Central Java, adding to Indonesia's effort to capture processing stages of the battery supply chain rather than exporting raw ore.

None of these is large on its own. Together they describe capital and market access moving along routes that do not pass through the traditional Western financial center, with middle powers rather than great powers doing the allocating. A multipolar economic order is being assembled in practice, one port concession, one advertising budget and one processing plant at a time.