The FT takes an old road

If the maxim that 'you are what you read' has any truth to it, the recent decision by the Financial Times to switch from its Asian to its European edition in the Gulf suggests that the local business elite considers itself more 'old Europe' than 'tiger' Asia.

"There's an overwhelming desire in the region to have the European, rather than the Asian edition," Mikael Heinio-Widell, managing director of the FT's Gulf commercial representative office, told ArabianBusiness.com last week.

Given that the Gulf supposedly lies on the 'new silk road' - or rather, the 21st-century twelve-lane silk superhighway - to Asia, this is more than a little surprising.

Bilateral trade between the UAE and China alone has been pumped up to a heavyweight $14.2bn annually according to official country statistics, a fact used to promote the FT's own 'FT China-Middle East Summit' held earlier this year.

So is the Middle East business community looking back to the way things have always been done, rather than to the future, as the switch to an 'old Europe' focused FT suggests?

There are two key points to be made.

Firstly, while it is easy to get excited by the fact that China-UAE trade is now worth $14.2bn, no one should forget the commercial value of old friendships. Trade between the UAE and the UK alone is worth $19.9bn, almost one-third more than that with China. So if the region's business community is still focused further West than East, there would be a considerable commercial reason for the FT to scrap its Asian edition.

However, the second point is how far things are swinging to the East. According to Tang Jiaxuan, China's state counsellor, trade with the entire Arab world could hit $100 billion by 2010, double its level now. This growth led to Sultan bin Sulayem, chairman of DP World, to argue that "China and India are the most important markets in the world."

So why has the FT adopted what could be an incredibly short-term strategy?

To answer this, you need to consider the newspaper's readership. Though read by a powerful demographic in the UK, it churns out just 130,000 copies a day. In the Gulf region its distribution - not paid-for readership, note - is just 5,000 (though it 'hopes' to increase this to 10,000). That's a fraction of the business readers who visit this website daily, and - in the UAE, for instance - about a twentieth of what is arguably the leading English newspaper, Gulf News.

This low distribution suggests that the FT could be looking to cater to the European managers in international companies who just want to read a publication that they get at 'home'. This is not necessarily representative of where the Gulf's business community is heading: even a lofty title like the FT has to consider its own commercial success.

The region's entrepreneurs and business people - or at least those who make it their duty to spot the next opportunity - will continue to do what they always have: look to take the best of both the East and West, towards the incredible energy and manufacturing growth of the Orient, and the consistent creativity and 'idea leadership' of Europe and the US.

The FT's decision to switch to its European edition ultimately says more about the defined nature of the newspaper's readership in the region, than the increasingly sophisticated and global orientation of the Gulf's business community itself.

My money's on the another swap, back to the Asian edition, within the next decade.

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