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

Chinese publishers accounted for about 80 percent of foreign advertising spending on RuStore in the first half, and Pure Battery Technologies committed $350 million to Central Java.

- Published: 2026-08-04T05:17:48.443Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/2026-08-04/gulf-capital-buys-ports-in-africa-chinese-advertisers-domina
- Publisher: Polylog (Global desk)
- Section: geopolitics
- Sources: [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/a4c6e5da-dc9f-43b0-a794-c3f6bb9bca7d), [TASS](https://tass.com/economy/2168653), [Antara](https://en.antaranews.com/news/425400/indonesia-secures-us350-million-australian-investment-in-batang-sez)

The Financial Times reports that the United Arab Emirates is [investing heavily in land, ports and political influence across Africa](https://www.ft.com/content/a4c6e5da-dc9f-43b0-a794-c3f6bb9bca7d), 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](https://tass.com/economy/2168653) 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](https://en.antaranews.com/news/425400/indonesia-secures-us350-million-australian-investment-in-batang-sez), 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.

## What this means

Trade and capital are being routed around Western intermediaries by states with the money to do it, which erodes the leverage that sanctions and market access have historically given Washington and Brussels. African port operations under Emirati control, a Russian app economy financed by Chinese advertisers, and Indonesian processing capacity funded by Australian and other regional investors each reduce a dependency that once served as policy leverage. The losers are Western logistics, platform and commodity-processing incumbents that assumed access by default.

## What to watch

- Further Emirati port and land acquisitions in Africa, and any host-government pushback, which would show the limits of the strategy.
- Whether Chinese firms expand from advertising into publishing and payments inside Russia, deepening a technology dependency that would be hard to reverse.
- New foreign commitments to Indonesian downstream processing, the measure of whether Jakarta's policy of restricting raw ore exports is attracting the capital it was designed to attract.