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The former CEO of DIFC Authority Nasser Alshaali reveals why he’s swapped the trading floor for the factory floor, with a career move to the UAE’s largest boat maker, Gulf Craft.

Judging by his career, Nasser Alshaali likes a crisis. Take his tenure at Dubai International Financial Centre. In 2004, DIFC was a hotbed of bad PR. Rumours swirled of questionable land deals that had claimed the scalps of two regulatory chiefs and were threatening to do the same to Dubai’s global financial ambitions. It was, Alshaali says, “at a point of crisis”. So, naturally, he threw his hat in the ring and joined its corporate planning department.

Five years later, we are in the throes of the worst financial calamity in memory. If analysts are agreed on one point, it is that the Gulf’s public sector, shored up by petrodollars, is the best place for job security. Yet Alshaali, who had risen through the ranks to become CEO of DIFC Authority, threw in his job earlier this year to run privately-owned yacht and boat manufacturer Gulf Craft. Is he hard-wired for stormy weather?

“I should clarify I didn’t leave at the crisis point itself,” he says, a smile pulling at his mouth. “We’d weathered the crisis into 2009, and I was there to get through that, but the fundamentals of DIFC are strong and it’s perfectly positioned still to become the financial hub of the region. You know; job accomplished – move on.”

So he did. To the helm of a 27-year-old UAE-based boat maker that deals in the luxury goods market, selling everything from 20ft speed boats to opulent 130ft yachts, boasting price tags upwards of AED20m.

Gulf Craft is widely seen as the largest boat and yacht manufacturer in the GCC, exporting roughly 80 percent of its product outside the UAE to 50 countries. Alshaali won’t disclose the turnover, but the company’s executive manager has said it passed the $100m mark last year, chalking up an annual growth rate of 30 percent.

This year’s balance sheet is unlikely to be quite so healthy. Real estate aside, there are few sectors that have been torpedoed by the financial crisis as effectively as the luxury goods market.

‘We’ve been hit like everyone else in 2009,” admits Alshaali. “The luxury goods market is the first to go down and the last to recover.”

The firm has been forced to make layoffs, though “much less” than three percent of its 1,300 staff, and a number of employees are on extended leave until orders pick up.

“I think the worst is behind us – and I say that with no small amount of trepidation – but we are hopeful 2010 will be a recovery year,” he says tentatively. “We know we’re not going to see the animation we saw in 2007 and 2008 in the coming few years.”

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