Electric Qatar

From pearl diving to natural gas, Qatar has built itself on the back of its natural resources. With a construction boom seemingly unaffected by the regional slowdown, Construction Week tours the capital Doha, to find out just what is driving the nation.

It has been singled out by economists as the best place to do business in 2009. Quite an accolade for a nation of less than 2 million people. This is Qatar. A hydrocarbon economy fueled by huge reserves of natural gas, and a healthy slice of the GCC's golden ticket - oil reserves.

Qatar is growing, and not just economically. Its population growth has been exponential in recent years. According to the Qatar Statistics Authority, the population of the nation was around the 744,000 mark in 2004. Today it has reached 1.45 million, and looks set to break the 1.5 million mark before the close of this year.

Such growth is visible in the nation's construction sector. Qatar's ambitious government has plans afoot to diversify its economy, an ongoing practice, which is most evident in the capital Doha.

Skyscrapers are continuing to rise in the Al Dafna area of the city, hugging the 7km-long corniche, oblivious to the construction slowdown that has gripped the industry in other GCC states. In the midst of such a construction boom, the nation is also coming to grips with the need to maintain its rich heritage and regional identity.

Zeyad Al Jaidah, co-founder and managing director of Doha-based systems integrator TechnoQ, exemplifies the new Qatar. "My grandfather ran a small scale pearl diving operation from Doha, where he was in charge of a diving crew," Al Jaidah explains.

Every so often, he would gather up his stock and make the trip to India where he would ply his trade. His son - Al Jaidah's father - took up the reigns of the family business and furthered the tradition of trade with India, continuing the sale of pearls but diversifying the family stock into electrical goods.

Al Jaidah continues, "Later, I had an electrical goods store in Doha alongside my brothers. But the problem was that we were no different to all the other stores in the area."

Al Jaidah took the family business to the next level in 1995 by choosing to focus on audio-visual technologies. Today's TechnoQ has diversified into audiovisual, security, control, fire, lighting, IT, broadcast and hospitality management systems, and is employed across a host of Qatari construction projects, working across all sectors including oil and gas, residential, health care, education and hospitality.

The rapid transformation in the fortunes of the Al Jaidah family symbolises the rise of Qatar, from a nation of pearl divers, to the country with the highest GDP in the world (US $87,000 (QAR317,000) per capita according to the IMF,) in just three generations.

Sound planning

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in January that Qatar will maintain a strong economic performance this year due to its income from natural gas and its sound fiscal policy. The IMF went on to underline what it saw as "the key challenges" facing the nation in the near future.

"The key challenges facing the authorities are to lower Qatar's high rate of inflation, continue to shield the economy from the global financial crisis, ensure that rapid credit growth does not undermine bank soundness, and diversify the economy," it said in a statement. And diversification, it would appear, is the name of the game in today's Doha.

For now, natural gas remains the fuel that is driving the city's construction boom. Qatar, which is home to just 0.022% of the world's population, sits upon 14.4% of its natural gas, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Only Russia and Iran sit on larger amounts of natural gas. Over time, that amounts to a lot of per-capita petrochemical dollars.

Qatar produced 59.8 billion m³ of natural gas in 2007, according to BP, the most recent year for which statistics are available. This represented a dramatic rise of 17.9% on the previous year.

Top of the government's social and cultural shopping list, and chief benefactor of the truckloads of petrochemical income, is the education sector.

On the edge of Doha lies Education City, a 14km² hub of educational facilities from school age to research level. Georgetown University's Qatar Campus is currently building a new facility within Education City, scheduled for completion in 2010. TechnoQ has had a close involvement with a number of the projects within Education City.

One such, the Al Shaqab Equestrian Academy, is a sprawling sporting facility currently under construction. It is financed by The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, a private, non-profit organisation founded by HH Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, emir of Qatar.

Gulf Leighton was awarded the $407 million contract in June 2006 for construction of Al Shaqab. The site is on schedule for an October completion date, when it is due to host its first show.

"It's a pretty impressive structure," says Gulf Leighton electrical supervisor Adam South as he leads a tour of the site. "The finished product is going to blow people away."

The project is borne out of HH Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani's love of horses - and it shows. The site will be home to more than 300 horses, 48 of which will be the emir's own. All the stables are air-conditioned.

"The amount of duct work is huge for the air conditioning," South says. "The horses will be well looked after, that's for sure."

Something old, something new

As progress strides ever onwards, there are some in Doha who underline the importance of maintaining the rich traditions of the past in the city's architecture. One such advocate is Arab Engineering Bureau managing director Ibrahim Jaidah. If the name sounds familiar, that is because Ibrahim is the older brother of none other than TechnoQ co-founder Zeyad Al Jaidah.

READERS' COMMENTS

MORE FROM ARABIANBUSINESS.COM